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Everything's Eventual

by Stephen King · 2002

Everything's Eventual is a 2002 collection of fourteen short stories and novellas by Stephen King, gathering work he produced across the late 1990s and early 2000s. The fourteen tales range across King's familiar registers… more

First published 2002 · 464 pages · English

29 quotes ★ 3.97 (110,513) Fiction

Quotes from the Book

Black as night and as beautiful as forever.
This is nine! Nine! This is nine! Nine! This is ten! Ten! We have killed your friends! Every friend is now dead! This is six! Six!" [...] "Eighteen! This is now eighteen! Take cover when the siren sounds! This is four! Four!" [...] "Five! This is five! Ignore the siren! Even if you leave this room, you can never leave this room! Eight! This is eight!" [...] "Six!' the phone screamed. 'Six, this is six, this is goddam fucking SIX!
Luck was a joke. Even good luck was just bad luck with its hair combed.
Ka was a wheel; it was also a net from which none ever escaped.
But in the wake of 'Bullet,' all the guys wanted to know was, 'How's it doing? How's it selling?' How to tell them I didn't give a flying fuck how it was doing in the marketplace, that what I cared about was how it was doing in the reader's heart?
A cat won't curry favor even if it's in their best interests to do so. A cat can't be a hypocrite. If more preachers were like cats, this would be a more religious country.
A library card is good to have, you can never have too much ID.
Stories are artifacts, not really made things which we create and can take credit for, but pre-existing objects which we dig up.
It might be that the biggest division in the world isn't men and women but folks who like cats and folks who like dogs" - (L.T.'s Theory of Pets)
...writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.
When creative people do their best work, they're hardly ever in charge, they're just sort of rolling along with their eyes shut yelling wheee.
Roland of Gilead responded as he ever had and ever would when such useless, mystifying questions were raised: 'Ka.
If something got you to turn off T.V. , it's a total success
But who can foresee such things? None of us can predict the final outcomes of our actions, and few of us even try; most of us just do what we do to prolong a moment's pleasure or to stop the pain. And even when we act for the noblest reasons, the last link of the chain all too often drips with someone's blood.
Absence may or may not make the heart grow fonder, but it certainly freshens the eye.
A broken spoon may become a fork.
Say, darling, I'm giving you this wonderful present, it's a machine that eats at one end and shits out the other, it's going to run for fifteen years, give or take, merry fucking Christmas.
Any fool who can pucker is apt to whistle past the graveyard.
Eventual, as Pug used to say. When he wanted to say something was really good, he's never say it was awesome, like most people do; he'd say it was eventual. How funny is that? The old Pugmeister. I wonder how he's doing.
That voice didn’t have logic on its side, but it didn’t need to. It had good lungs and just outscreamed logic.
On some level I believed him completely, as we always believe on some level, the worst thing our hearts can imagine
I never read the paper myself. Why bother? It's the same old shit day in and day out, dictators beating the ching-chong out of people weaker than they are, men in uniforms beating the ching-chong out of soccer balls or footballs, politicians kissing babies and kissing ass.
All I wanted was eighteen holes of golf on Saturday afternoon, and instead I turned into Snow White with hair on my chest.
No me interesa la credibilidad, sino la libertad, y he descubierto que escribir puede proporcionarla.
I opened the door of the Mercedes and got in. Man, that smell. It’s leather, but not just leather. You know how, in Monopoly, there’s a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card? When you’re rich enough to afford a car that smells like Mr. Sharpton’s gray Mercedes, you must have a Get-Out-of-Everything-Free card.
Tell you something, my friend — if I worked hard and really wanted it, there might be a real Rembrandt on my wall someday. Sure. In a job like this, there is nowhere to go but up. In a way, that’s the scary part...
Are you a gunslinger, Roland? If you are, you better get ready.
If there's to be damnation, she had said, let it be of my choosing, not theirs. He knew a little about damnation himself… and he had an idea that the lessons, far from being done, were just beginning.
For people like us, little people who went scurrying through the world like mice in a cartoon, sometimes laughing at the assholes was the only revenge you could ever get.

Did you know?

  • The collection gathers fourteen short stories and novellas written by Stephen King.
  • King has said he set the order of the stories by shuffling and dealing a partial deck of playing cards, letting chance determine the sequence.
  • "Riding the Bullet," included here, had earlier been released as a widely publicized commercial e-book.
  • "The Little Sisters of Eluria" is connected to King's Dark Tower series.
  • Several of the stories were first published in The New Yorker.
  • "The Man in the Black Suit" won both the O. Henry Award and the World Fantasy Award before appearing in this collection.

About Stephen King

Stephen King is a prolific American author of horror, suspense, science fiction, and fantasy, best known for novels such as Carrie, The Shining, It, and the Dark Tower series. He is one of the best-selling writers of all time and has received numerous honors, including the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

More about the author →

About the book

Everything's Eventual is a 2002 collection of fourteen short stories and novellas by Stephen King, gathering work he produced across the late 1990s and early 2000s. The fourteen tales range across King's familiar registers of horror, dark fantasy, and unsettling realism, and include pieces such as the title story, "1408," "Riding the Bullet," "The Man in the Black Suit," and "The Little Sisters of Eluria," the last of which connects to King's Dark Tower saga.

The collection roams across King's recurring preoccupations: mortality and the thin membrane between the ordinary and the monstrous, the cruelty that can erupt in everyday settings, and characters confronting forces larger and stranger than themselves. King prefaces several stories with notes on their origins, and famously described arranging the running order by shuffling and dealing a partial deck of cards, letting chance set the sequence.

The book draws on stories that had already earned significant recognition, including "The Man in the Black Suit," which won the O. Henry Award and the World Fantasy Award, and several pieces first published in The New Yorker. "Riding the Bullet" had earlier made news as a pioneering commercial e-book release. The collection stands as a showcase of King's range in short form, and two of its stories, "1408" and "Riding the Bullet," were later adapted as films.

Book details

First published
2002
Length
464 pages
Reading time
21 hours
Genre
Fiction
Goodreads rating
3.97 (111k ratings)

Critical reception

  • The collection assembles previously acclaimed stories, including "The Man in the Black Suit," winner of the O. Henry Award and the World Fantasy Award.
  • Several stories in the book were originally published in The New Yorker.
  • "Riding the Bullet" was notable as one of King's pioneering e-book releases before its inclusion here.

Movie & TV adaptations

  • IMDb
    1408 2007

    Theatrical horror film starring John Cusack, based on the short story.

  • IMDb
    Riding the Bullet 2004

    Film adaptation directed by Mick Garris, based on the story.

If you liked this, read…

  1. 1
    Skeleton CrewAnother major Stephen King short-story collection spanning horror and dark fantasy.
  2. 2
    Night ShiftKing's earlier collection of unsettling short tales in a similar vein.
  3. 3
    Nightmares & DreamscapesA wide-ranging King collection mixing horror, suspense, and the strange.

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