“At bottom, you see, we are not Homo sapiens as all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle. And that is what the Pulse exposed five days ago.”
― Stephen King, quote from Cell
“What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle.”
― Stephen King, quote from Cell
“Man has come to dominate the planet thanks to two essential traits. One is intelligence. The other has been the absolute willingness to kill anyone and anything that gets in his way.”
― Stephen King, quote from Cell
“This is how a man looks when he's deciding that the risk of death is better than the risk of change.”
― Stephen King, quote from Cell
“He said the mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows.”
― Stephen King, quote from Cell
“Clay said, "If they have flashlights like us, we can almost assume-"
"We can't assume anything," [Alice] said restlessly, querulously. "My father says assume makes an ass out of you and me. Get it, u and-"
"I get it," Clay said.”
― Stephen King, quote from Cell
“Although neither the Freudians nor the Jungians come right out and say it, they strongly suggest that we may have a core, a single basic carrier wave, or-to use language with which Jordan is comfortable-a single line of written code which cannot be stripped.'
'The PD,' Jordan said. 'The prime directive'.
'Yes,' the Head agreed. 'At bottom, you see, we are not Homo sapiens at all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle.”
― Stephen King, quote from Cell
“Three days ago we not only ruled the earth, we had survivor's guilt about all the other species we'd wiped out on our climb to the nirvana of round-the-clock cable news and microwave popcorn. Now we're the Flashlight People.”
― Stephen King, quote from Cell
“Leave it at this: man has come to dominate the planet thanks to two essential traits. One is intelligence. The other has been the absolute willingness to kill anyone and anything that get in his way.”
― Stephen King, quote from Cell
“Can a mordern city burn,' he asked Tom. 'One made mostly of concrete and metal and glass? Could it burn the way Chicago did after Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked over the lantern?”
― Stephen King, quote from Cell
“It would occur to him later that the body knows how to fight when it has to. That it’s a secret the body keeps, just as it does the secrets of how to run or jump a creek or throw a fuck or—quite likely—die when there’s no other choice. That under conditions of extreme stress it simply takes over and does what needs doing while the brain stands off to one side, unable to do anything but whistle and tap its foot”
― Stephen King, quote from Cell
“At half past three, in the ditch of the night, Alice said: “Oh, Mummy, too bad! Fading roses, this garden’s over.”
― Stephen King, quote from Cell
“It'll be all right, Clay. Really." "So you say, but you have a persecution complex and delusions of grandeur." "That's true," Tom said, "but they're balanced out by poor self-image and ego menstruation at roughly six week intervals...”
― Stephen King, quote from Cell
“That tight little accent grated on Clay’s frayed nerves. He thought that if it had been a fart, it would have been the kind that comes out sounding like a party-horn blown by a kid with asthma.”
― Stephen King, quote from Cell
“He did it with a teacher's natural assumptions: lecturing was his responsibility, interruption his privilege.”
― Stephen King, quote from Cell
“En el fondo no somos homo sapiens, pues nuestro núcleo es la locura, y la directiva primordial, el asesinato. Lo que Darwin fue demasiado educado para expresar, amigos míos, es que no llegamos a dominar el mundo porque seamos los más inteligentes ni los más malvados, sino porque siempre hemos sido los cabrones más chiflados y asesinos de toda la selva.”
― Stephen King, quote from Cell
“His cock swung from side to side like the pendulum of a grandfather clock on speed.”
― Stephen King, quote from Cell
“have no interest in handing down an indictment of mankind. If I did, I’d point out that for every Michelangelo there’s a Marquis de Sade, for every Gandhi an Eichmann, for every Martin Luther King an Osama bin Laden. Leave it at this: man has come to dominate the planet thanks to two essential traits. One is intelligence. The other has been the absolute willingness to kill anyone and anything that gets in his way.” He”
― Stephen King, quote from Cell
“La inteligencia humana terminó por imponerse al instinto asesino, y la razón sofocó los impulsos más dementes de los hombres.”
― Stephen King, quote from Cell
Stephen King
Born place: in Portland, Maine, The United States
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“Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!”
― William Shakespeare, quote from Julius Caesar
“Although she was ashamed to admit it now, the darkness in him had been the largest part of his allure. It was such an anomaly, a contrast to what she'd known from life. It had made him dangerous. Exciting. Sexy. But that was a fantasy. This was real.
He suffered. And there was nothing sexy or thrilling about that. (Zsadists & Bella)”
― J.R. Ward, quote from Lover Eternal
“We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot. I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician. My intent wasn't to save the world as much as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession, we must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. but it can also deepen the wound.”
― Abraham Verghese, quote from Cutting for Stone
“A Great Rabbi stands, teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife's adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death.
There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine - a Speaker for the Dead - has told me of two other Rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I'm going to tell you.
The Rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. 'Is there any man here,' he says to them, 'who has not desired another man's wife, another woman's husband?'
They murmur and say, 'We all know the desire, but Rabbi none of us has acted on it.'
The Rabbi says, 'Then kneel down and give thanks that God has made you strong.' He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, 'Tell the Lord Magistrate who saved his mistress, then he'll know I am his loyal servant.'
So the woman lives because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.
Another Rabbi. Another city. He goes to her and stops the mob as in the other story and says, 'Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone.'
The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. ‘Someday,’ they think, ‘I may be like this woman. And I’ll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her as I wish to be treated.’
As they opened their hands and let their stones fall to the ground, the Rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman’s head and throws it straight down with all his might it crushes her skull and dashes her brain among the cobblestones. ‘Nor am I without sins,’ he says to the people, ‘but if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead – and our city with it.’
So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance.
The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis and when they veer too far they die. Only one Rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation.
So of course, we killed him.
-San Angelo
Letters to an Incipient Heretic”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Speaker for the Dead
“I take courage,” Aeneas said. “Here too there are tears for things, and hearts are touched by the fate of all that is mortal.”
― Edith Hamilton, quote from Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes
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