Quotes from Bag of Bones

“Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“For men, I think, love is a thing formed of equal parts lust and astonishment. The astonishment part women understand. The lust part they only think they understand.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“The muses are ghosts, and sometimes they come uninvited.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“I see things, that's all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root-canal at a time; boat-builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightening flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“I was being paid to do what I loved, and there's no gig on earth better than that; it's like a license to steal.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“Her body was wrapped in shadows like moth wings, like rose-petals.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“A person can go along quite awhile if they get a good day every once and again.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“I think reality is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“So what, ghosts can't hurt you. That's what I thought then.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“...fear is actually an acronym for Fuck Everything And Run.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“A writer is a man who has taught his mind to misbehave.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“The dream didn't fade as dreams usually do upon waking.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“the look of the sky as the day's blue blood runs out of its cheek.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“The water was glassy and calm, still candy-colored in the afterglow of sunset.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“Things conceived by minds and made by hands can never be quite the same, even if they try their best to be identical, because they're never the same from day to day or even moment to moment.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“And perhaps the greatest blessing was that we never knew how short the time was.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“Any good marriage is secret territory, a necessary white space on society's map. What others don't know about it is what makes it yours.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“What comes in when daylight leaves is a kind of certainty: that beneath the skin there is a secret, some mystery both black and bright. You feel this mystery in every breath, you see it in every shadow, you expect to plunge into it at every turn of a step.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“When one has little faith, one must survive from day to day signs-”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“Murder is the worst kind of pornography, murder is let me do what I want taken to its final extreme.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“My first editor used to say that eighty-five per cent of what goes on in a novelist's head is none of his business, a sentiment I've never believed should be restricted to just writers.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“I don't call people for help. It's not because of the way I was raised, at least I don't think so; it's the
way I was made. Johanna once said that if I was drowning at Dark Score Lake, where we have a summer home, I would die silently fifty feet out from the public beach rather than yell for help. It's
not a question of love or affection. I can give those and I can take them. I feel pain like anyone else.
I need to touch and be touched. But if someone asks me, 'Are you all right?' I can't answer no. I
can't say help me.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“When an imaginative person gets into mental trouble, the line between seeming and being has a way of disappearing-”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there,” Hardy supposedly said, “the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.” I understood because that was what I felt like in those interminable, dissembling days: a bag of bones.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

“The sun had burned through and the day had gone from dull to dazzling, yet in the west blask-satin thunderheads continued to stack up. It was as if night has burst a blood-vessel in the sky over there.”
― Stephen King, quote from Bag of Bones

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Popular quotes

“But I never forgot Shosha. I dreamed of her at night. In my dreams she was both dead and alive. I played with her in a garden which was also a cemetery. Dead girls joined us there, wearing garments that were ornate shrouds. They danced in circles and sang songs. They swung, skated, occasionally hovered in the air. I strolled with Shosha in a forest of gigantic trees that reached the sky. The birds there were different from any I knew. They were as big as eagles, as colorful as parrots. They spoke Yiddish. From the thickets surrounding the garden, beasts with human faces showed themselves. Shosha was at home in this garden, and instead of my pointing out and explaining to her as I had done in the past, she revealed to me things I hadn't known and whispered secrets in my ear. Her hair had grown long enough to reach her loins, and her flesh glowed like mother-of-pearl. I always awoke from this dream with a sweet taste in my mouth and the impression that Shosha was on longer living.”
― Isaac Bashevis Singer, quote from Shosha

“The Sultan tapped his tented fingers, staring into the distance. Suddenly, he lunged toward me, took hold of my wrist, and pulled me roughly down to sit on the cushion beside him. “This . . . mermaid,” he said through clenched teeth, leaning in so close to me that I could smell the mint on his breath. “The one who sang to the king at night.” His voice was fierce, but quiet. I couldn’t tell if anyone but me could hear. “How . . .” he began. “How did she think of the king . . . in her heart?”
I glanced quickly up at his face and saw there a look that took me by surprise. An oddly soft, vulnerable, hurting look. The look of a man who might cry out in his sleep at night, like a child. But then the stony mask slid back.
“Did she despise him,” the Sultan asked, “for making her sing for her life each night? Did she only pretend affection to save her own skin? Did she . . . loathe him for what he had done before, to his other wives? For his . . . sins?”
“No, my lord,” I said softly. “She loved him.”
“Do you swear it?” He gripped my wrist harder, until it hurt.
“Yes, my lord. She told me—” I stopped, corrected myself. “She told the mermaid with the broken fin. She said the king—the merman king, my lord—she said that he had a deep hurting inside him. She said that she wanted to soothe him. And when the mermaid with the broken fin . . . questioned how the queen could love him—because of the things you just said, my lord—the queen said, ‘I’m not ashamed of loving him. There’s nothing wrong with loving someone. It’s hating—that’s what’s wrong.”
― Susan Fletcher, quote from Shadow Spinner

“As ingenious as this explanation is, it seems to me to miss entirely the emotional significance of the text- its beautiful and beautifully economical evocation of certain difficult feelings that most ordinary people, at least, are all too familiar with: searing regret for the past we must abandon, tragic longing for what must be left behind. (...) Still, perhaps that's the pagan, the Hellenist in me talking. (Rabbi Friedman, by contrast, cannot bring himself even to contemplate that what the people of Sodom intend to do to the two male angels, as they crowd around Lot's house at the beginning of the narrative, is to rape them, and interpretation blandly accepted by Rashi, who blithely points out thta if the Sodomites hadn't wanted sexual pleasure from the angels, Lot wouldn't have suggested, as he rather startingly does, that the Sodomites take his two daughter as subsitutes. But then, Rashi was French.)

It is this temperamental failure to understand Sodom in its own context, as an ancient metropolis of the Near East, as a site of sophisticated, even decadent delights and hyper-civilized beauties, that results in the commentator's inability to see the true meaning of the two crucial elements of this story: the angel's command to Lot's family not to turn and look back at the city they are fleeing, and the transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt. For if you see Sodom as beautiful -which it will seem to be all the more so, no doubt, for having to be abandoned and lost forever, precisely the way in which, say, relatives who are dead are always somehow more beautiful and good than those who still live- then it seems clear that Lot and his family are commanded not to look back at it not as a punishment, but for a practical reason: because regret for what we have lost, for the pasts we have to abandon, often poisons any attempts to make a new life, which is what Lot and his family now must do, as Noah and his family once had to do, as indeed all those who survive awful annihilations must somehow do. This explanation, in turn, helps explain the form that the punishment of Lot's wife took- if indeed it was a punishment to begin with, which I personally do not believe it was, since to me it seems far more like a natural process, the inevitable outcome of her character. For those who are compelled by their natures always to be looking back at what has been, rather than forward into the future, the great danger is tears, the unstoppable weeping that the Greeks, if not the author of Genesis, knew was not only a pain but a narcotic pleasure, too: a mournful contemplation so flawless, so crystalline, that it can, in the end, immobilize you.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, quote from The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

“I have nothing again,” she said. “A little suitcase, a car with stolen license plates on it, a child and one on the way...” “You have everything,” he said. “A car with stolen license plates, a son, a baby on the way, friends...” “I had friends before,” she whispered. “They were scared of him. He ran them off and I lost them forever.” “Do I look like the kind of friend he can scare? Run off?” He pulled her gently onto his lap and she rested her head against his chest. “I don’t know why I stay so crazy,” she said softly. “He’s not anywhere near. He’ll never guess this place. But I’m still scared.” “Yeah, that happens.” “You’re never scared,” she said. He chuckled softly, stroked her back. He was scared of a bunch of things, number one being the day she got these problems managed and left with Christopher. “That’s what you think,” he said. “In the Marines, they used to say everyone’s afraid, so you have to learn to use fear to your advantage. Man, if you ever figure out how you do that, let me know. Okay?” “What did you do when you were scared?” she asked. “One of two things,” he said. “I’d either pee myself, or I’d get mad.” She lifted her head off his chest, looked at him and laughed a little. “That’s a girl,” he said, wiping off her cheeks.”
― Robyn Carr, quote from Shelter Mountain

“But since Sloth I've been so monogamous I make the demonstration banana that AIDS educators use to show how to put on a condom, look slutty.”
― Lauren Beukes, quote from Zoo City

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