“We lie best when we lie to ourselves.”
― Stephen King, quote from It
“Your hair is winter fire
January embers
My heart burns there, too.”
― Stephen King, quote from It
“Maybe there aren't any such things as good friends or bad friends - maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you're hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they're always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for too, if that's what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.”
― Stephen King, quote from It
“Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls-Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his face in her heart all the time, a kind of sweet, hurtful ache. She would have died for him..”
― Stephen King, quote from It
“Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.”
― Stephen King, quote from It
“Come on back and we’ll see if you remember the simplest thing of all – how it is to be children, secure in belief and thus afraid of the dark.”
― Stephen King, quote from It
“Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand.”
― Stephen King, quote from It
“What can be done when you’re eleven can often never be done again.”
― Stephen King, quote from It
“No good friends, no bad friends; only people you want, need to be with. People who build their houses in your heart.”
― Stephen King, quote from It
“Swear to me swear to me that if it isn't dead you'll all come back.”
― Stephen King, quote from It
“Everything's a lot tougher when it's for real. That's when you choke. When it's for real.”
― Stephen King, quote from It
“Want your boat, Georgie?' Pennywise asked. 'I only repeat myself because you really do not seem that eager.' He held it up, smiling. He was wearing a baggy silk suit with great big orange buttons. A bright tie, electric-blue, flopped down his front, and on his hands were big white gloves, like the kind Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck always wore.
Yes, sure,' George said, looking into the stormdrain.
And a balloon? I’ve got red and green and yellow and blue...'
Do they float?'
Float?' The clown’s grin widened. 'Oh yes, indeed they do. They float! And there’s cotton candy...'
George reached.
The clown seized his arm.
And George saw the clown’s face change.
What he saw then was terrible enough to make his worst imaginings of the thing in the cellar look like sweet dreams; what he saw destroyed his sanity in one clawing stroke.
They float,' the thing in the drain crooned in a clotted, chuckling voice. It held George’s arm in its thick and wormy grip, it pulled George toward that terrible darkness where the water rushed and roared and bellowed as it bore its cargo of storm debris toward the sea. George craned his neck away from that final blackness and began to scream into the rain, to scream mindlessly into the white autumn sky which curved above Derry on that day in the fall of 1957. His screams were shrill and piercing, and all up and down Witcham Street people came to their windows or bolted out onto their porches.
They float,' it growled, 'they float, Georgie, and when you’re down here with me, you’ll float, too–'
George's shoulder socked against the cement of the curb and Dave Gardener, who had stayed home from his job at The Shoeboat that day because of the flood, saw only a small boy in a yellow rain-slicker, a small boy who was screaming and writhing in the gutter with muddy water surfing over his face and making his screams sound bubbly.
Everything down here floats,' that chuckling, rotten voice whispered, and suddenly there was a ripping noise and a flaring sheet of agony, and George Denbrough knew no more.
Dave Gardener was the first to get there, and although he arrived only forty-five seconds after the first scream, George Denbrough was already dead. Gardener grabbed him by the back of the slicker, pulled him into the street...and began to scream himself as George's body turned over in his hands. The left side of George’s slicker was now bright red. Blood flowed into the stormdrain from the tattered hole where his left arm had been. A knob of bone, horribly bright, peeked through the torn cloth.
The boy’s eyes stared up into the white sky, and as Dave staggered away toward the others already running pell-mell down the street, they began to fill with rain.”
― Stephen King, quote from It
“Best not to look back. Best to believe there will be happily ever afters all the way around - and so there may be; who is to say there will not be such endings? Not all boats which sail away into darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teachers that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question.”
― Stephen King, quote from It
“It's offense you maybe can't live with because it opens up a crack inside your thinking, and if you look down into it you see there are evil things down there, and they have little yellow eyes that don't blink, and there's a stink down there in that dark and after a while you think maybe there's a whole other universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything, he would have told them if he could. Go to your church and listen to your stories about Jesus walking on the water, but if I saw a guy doing that I'd scream and scream and scream. Because it wouldn't look like a miracle to me. It would look like an offense.”
― Stephen King, quote from It
“Politics always change. Stories never do.”
― Stephen King, quote from It
“Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up”
― Stephen King, quote from It
“A child blind from birth doesn't even know he's blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it.”
― Stephen King, quote from It
“You can't be careful on a skateboard.”
― Stephen King, quote from It
“I’m the Turtle, son. I made the universe, but please don’t blame me for it; I had a belly-ache.”
― Stephen King, quote from It
“I started after him...and the clown looked back. I saw Its eyes, and all at once I understood who It was."
"Who was it, Don?" Harold Gardner asked softly.
"It was Derry," Don Hagarty said. "It was this town.”
― Stephen King, quote from It
“Seven, Richie thought. That's the magic number. There has to be seven of us. That's the way it's supposed to be.”
― Stephen King, quote from It
“once you get into cosmological shit like this, you got to throw away the instruction manual”
― Stephen King, quote from It
“stop now before i kill you
a word to the wise from your friend
PENNYWISE ”
― Stephen King, quote from It
“But still, sometimes, in the heart of winter when the light outside seemed yellow- sleepy, like a cat curled up on a sofa...”
― Stephen King, quote from It
“You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for... and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you.”
― Stephen King, quote from It
“The energy you drew on so extravagantly when you were a kid, the energy you thought would never exhaust itself - that slipped away somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four, to be replaced by something much duller, something as bogus as a coke high: purpose, maybe, or goals, or whatever rah-rah Junior Chamber of Commerce word you wanted to use. It was no big deal; it didn't go all at once, with a bang. And maybe, Richie thought, that's the scary part. How you didn't stop being a kid all at once, with a big explosive bang, like one of that clown's trick balloons. The kid in you just leaked out, like the air of a tire.”
― Stephen King, quote from It
Stephen King
Born place: in Portland, Maine, The United States
See more on GoodReads
“One of the foundations of truth in the universe is that courage is required of any truly great species, and not just any courage. A lust for death and a willingness to die does not constitute courage. Courage is when you are willing to sacrifice your short-term desires for a greater purpose. Courage is when you are willing to live and endure suffering to achieve a greater end.”
― Roy Huff, quote from The First Pillar
“Some men are just Olin bad news. Then there are good men. They'll do. Then there are good men you love. If you find the last one of the last kind, you'd better hang on to him with every thing you have.”
― Julie Kibler, quote from Calling Me Home
“way back to the apartment. I fixed”
― John Grisham, quote from The Street Lawyer
“You must remember, too," he added, "that we deal with no ordinary criminal, but with the second greatest brain in the world." I forbore to pander to his conceit by asking the obvious question.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Big Four
“External life being so mighty, the instruments so huge and terrible, the performances so great, the thoughts so great and threatening, you produce a someone who can exist before it. You invent a man who can stand before the terrible appearances. This way he can't get justice and he can't give justice, but he can live. And this is what mere humanity always does. It's made up of these inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each in his own way trying to recruit other people to play a supporting role and sustain him in his make-believe... That's the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of what's real.”
― Saul Bellow, quote from The Adventures of Augie March
The Twelve Kingdoms:...
Islands in the Net
The Chronicles of Ma...
In Conquest Born
Silence in October
The Pleasures of the...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
