Apt Pupil Quotes

“Your own politicians make our Dr. Goebbels look like a child playing with picture books in a kindergarten. They speak of morality while they douse screaming children and old women in burning napalm. Your draft-resisters are called cowards and ‘peaceniks.’ For refusing to follow orders they are either put in jails or scourged from the country. Those who demonstrate against this country's unfortunate Asian adventure are clubbed down in the streets. The GI soldiers who kill the innocent are decorated by Presidents, welcomed home from the bayoneting of children and the burning of hospitals with parades and bunting. They are given dinners, Keys to the City, free tickets to pro football games.” He toasted his glass in Todd's direction. “Only those who lose are tried as war criminals for following orders and directives.”
― Stephen King, Apt Pupil

“No,' he said. 'I don't think anyone dies happy...but you could die well.”
― Stephen King, Apt Pupil

“Sometimes, the past don't rest so easy. Why else do people study history?”
― Stephen King, Apt Pupil

“What does a good man fall back on when the situation is desperate? His faith, of course. The science of a new century. The love of his friends.”
― Stephen King, Apt Pupil

“You see something for the first time, and right away you know you have found YOUR GREAT INTEREST. It’s like a key turning in a lock. Or falling in love for the first time.”
― Stephen King, Apt Pupil

“Maybe we know that under the right set of circumstances the things that live in the catacombs would be glad to crawl out.”
― Stephen King, Apt Pupil

“It’s depressing, but it’s a fact of life. Usually the ones that are first to get spit out of the machine we’re running here are the class troublemakers, the sullen, uncommunicative kids, the ones who refuse to even try. They are simply warm bodies waiting for the system to buck them up through the grades or waiting to get old enough so they can quit without their parents’ permission and join the Army or get a job at the Speedy-Boy Carwash or marry their boyfriends. You understand? I’m being blunt. Our system is, as they say, not all it’s cracked up to be.”
― Stephen King, Apt Pupil

“people made up politics so they could do things.”
― Stephen King, Apt Pupil

“The things that happened in those camps still have power enough to make the stomach flutter with nausea. I feel that way myself, although the only close relative I ever had in the camps was my grandfather, and he died when I was three. But maybe there is something about what the Germans did that exercises a deadly fascination over us—something that opens the catacombs of the imagination. Maybe part of our dread and horror comes from a secret knowledge that under the right—or wrong—set of circumstances, we ourselves would be willing to build such places and staff them. Black serendipity. Maybe we know that under the right set of circumstances the things that live in the catacombs would be glad to crawl out.”
― Stephen King, Apt Pupil

“How could anyone stand to eat a fried egg? On the grill of the Jenn-Air for two minutes, then over easy. What you got on your plate at the end looked like a giant dead eye with a cataract over it, an eye that would bleed orange when you poked it with your fork.”
― Stephen King, Apt Pupil

“It is very strange to me, you know—the older one becomes, the less one has to lose in matters of life and death . . . and yet, one becomes more and more conservative.”
― Stephen King, Apt Pupil

“for a kid the whole world’s a laboratory. You have to let them poke around in it. And if the kid in question has a healthy home life and loving parents, he’ll be all the stronger for having knocked around a few strange corners.”
― Stephen King, Apt Pupil

“All the magazines said it was bad, what had happened. But all the stories were continued at the back of the book, and when you turned to those pages, the words saying it was bad were surrounded by ads, and these ads sold German knives and belts and helmets as well as Magic Trusses and Guaranteed Hair Restorer. These ads sold German flags emblazoned with swastikas and Nazi Lugers and a game called Panzer Attack as well as correspondence lessons and offers to make you rich selling elevator shoes to short men. They said it was bad, but it seemed like a lot of people must not mind.”
― Stephen King, Apt Pupil

“A veces el pasado no se queda tranquilo, ¿por qué, si no, estudia historia la gente?”
― Stephen King, Apt Pupil

“He wanted to know everything . . . all the gooshy parts. That’s how he put it, yes: “All the gooshy parts.”
― Stephen King, Apt Pupil

“He supposed he had the boy to thank for this new method of quieting himself, for showing him that the key to the past’s terrors was not in rejection but in contemplation and even something like a friend’s embrace. It was true that before the boy’s unexpected arrival last summer he hadn’t had any bad dreams for a long time, but he believed now that he had come to a coward’s terms with his past. He had been forced to give up a part of himself. Now he had reclaimed it.”
― Stephen King, Apt Pupil

“Why . . . I want to hear about it. That’s all. That’s all I want. Really.” “Hear about it?” Dussander echoed. He looked utterly perplexed. Todd leaned forward, tanned elbows on bluejeaned knees. “Sure. The firing squads. The gas chambers. The ovens. The guys who had to dig their own graves and then stand on the ends so they’d fall into them. The . . .” His tongue came out and wetted his lips. “The examinations. The experiments. Everything. All the gooshy stuff.” Dussander stared at him with a certain amazed detachment, the way a veterinarian might stare at a cat who was giving birth to a succession of two-headed kittens. “You are a monster,” he said softly.”
― Stephen King, Apt Pupil

“I think a person can do anything if they try hard enough, you know it? It’s corny but true.”
― Stephen King, Apt Pupil

“No man is an island, entire of itself—’ ” Todd began, and Morris laughed. “Donne, he quotes at me! A smart kid! Your friend there, is he very bad off?” “Well, the doctors say he’s doing fine, considering his age. He’s eighty.” “That old!” Morris exclaimed. “He”
― Stephen King, Apt Pupil

“Josef Kramer, he remembered, had been fond of saying that the dead speak, but we hear them with our noses.”
― Stephen King, Apt Pupil

“They had no secrets from each other, none at all (except for the fact that Dick Bowden was sometimes unfaithful with his secretary, but that wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you told your thirteen-year-old son, was it? . . . and besides, that had absolutely no bearing on his home life, his family life).”
― Stephen King, Apt Pupil