Gerald's Game Quotes

“If anyone ever asks you what panic is, now you can tell them: an emotional blank spot that leaves you feeling as if you've been sucking on a mouthful of pennies.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“Sometimes it takes heart to write about a thing, doesn't it? To let that thing out of the room way in the back of your mind and put it up there on the screen.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“When all the normal patterns and routines of a person’s life fell apart—and with such shocking suddenness—you had to find something you could hold onto, something that was both sane and predictable.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“Words had a way of creating their own imperatives.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“People are almost always safe from ghosts and ghouls and the living dead in daylight, and they're usually safe from them at night if they're with others, but when a person is alone in the dark, all bets are off. Men and women alone in the dark are like open doors, Jessie, and if they call out or scream for help, who knows what dread things may answer? Who knows what some men and women have seen in the hour of their solitary deaths? Is it so hard to believe that some of them may have died of fear, no matter what the words on the death certificates say?”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“Some nightmares never completely ended.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“It was as if the body disdained memory... or refused the responsibility of it.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“men were not so much gifted with penises as cursed with them.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“Listening to it was like having a mud-slimed piece of silk drawn lightly back and forth across her face.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“I want to tell you something else, something I’m really starting to believe: I’m going to be okay. Not today, not tomorrow, and not next week, but eventually. As okay as we mortals are privileged to get, anyway. It’s good to know that—good to know that survival is still an option, and that sometimes it even feels good. That sometimes it actually feels like victory.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“Some memories battened onto a person's mind like evil leeches, and certain words could bring them instantly back to squirming, feverish life.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“They ought to make it a law that you have to get a license, or at least a learner’s permit, before you’re allowed to talk. Until you pass your Talker’s Test, you should have to be a mute.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“Oh, what the fuck,' she told the empty house. 'Bring on the night.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“Men still think the same things about us they have always thought, Ruth - I'm sure of it. A lot of them have learned to say the right things at the right times, but as my mother used to say, 'Even a cannibal can learn to recite the Apostles' Creed'.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“Even if things go all wrong they'll work out just fine.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“Jesus, sometimes I can’t believe how dumb people can be. They ought to make it a law that you have to get a license, or at least a learner’s permit, before you’re allowed to talk. Until you pass your Talker’s Test, you should have to be a mute. It would solve a lot of problems.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“That slit was the object of every man's lust - the heterosexual ones, at least - but it was frequently an object of their inexplicable scorn, distrust, and hate. You didn't hear that dark anger in all their jokes, but it was present in enough of them, and in some it was right out front, raw as a sore: What's a woman? A life-support system for a cunt .”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“The light dawned, then, Ruth. I suddenly understood that all of them—all the men investigating what had happened out at the lake—had made certain assumptions about how I’d handled the situation and why I’d done the things I’d done. Most of them worked in my favor, and that certainly simplified things, but there was still something both infuriating and a little spooky in the realization that they drew most of their conclusions not from what I’d said or from any evidence they’d found in the house, but only from the fact that I’m a woman, and women can be expected to behave in certain predictable ways.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“How can things have possibly gotten from there to here? Sorry, folks, but this just has to be a dream. It’s much too absurd for reality.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“What I think is this: Gerald died before he ever had a chance to climb into the saddle, but he fucked me good and proper just the same.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“The truth, first encountered on that day, was this: there was a well inside her, the water in that well was poisoned, and when he goosed her, William had sent a bucket down there, one which had come up filled with scum and squirming gluck.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“Her mind’s constant insistence that it was a mistake was understandable but irrelevant.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“It had all been a little too bright to be real, like things seen through a fever which is not quite high enough to be life-threatening. In fact, those first two years had been a blast. The blast had ended with that first meeting of the women’s consciousness group. In there, Jessie had discovered a ghastly gray world which seemed simultaneously to preview the adult future that lay ahead for her in the eighties and to whisper of gloomy childhood secrets that had been buried alive in the sixties . . . but did not lie quiet there.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“She felt a swollen green sac of poison pulsing somewhere inside her -- bitter stuff, hateful as hemlock. She was afraid that if that sac burst, she would choke on her own frustrated rage.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“She shouldn't be thinking this way; it brought the panic-thing closer. If she didn't get her mind out of this rut, she would soon see the panic-thing's stupid, terrified eyes. No, she absolutely shouldn't be thinking this way. The bitch of it was, once you got started, it was very hard to stop again.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“She waited to feel a pang of shame at hitting below the belt like this and was pleased - or maybe it was relief she felt - when no pang came. I guess maybe I'm just tired of pretending she thought.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“I’m peeling my hand, she thought. Oh dear Jesus, I’m peeling it like an orange.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“Le cose cambiano specialmente al buio, affermava, quando una persona è sola. In quella condizione, dalla gabbia che contiene l'immaginazione cadono i lucchetti e allora qualunque cosa può mettersi a circolare liberamente.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“los sueños son como capullos de polilla vacíos o como abiertas vainas de algodón, cáscaras muertas en cuyo interior la vida aleteó fugazmente, animada por un furioso pero frágil vendaval de energía.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game

“nothing cheered up a handcuffed woman more reliably than a little Country Morning Rose Blusher. All the women’s magazines said so.”
― Stephen King, Gerald's Game