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It

by Stephen King

It is a 1986 horror novel by Stephen King set in the fictional town of Derry, Maine. The story alternates between two time periods separated by twenty-seven years, following seven outcast children who call themselves the… more

First published 1986 · 1138 pages · English

25 quotes ★ 4.24 (1,303,651) Fiction

Quotes from the Book

We lie best when we lie to ourselves.
Your hair is winter fire January embers My heart burns there, too.
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.
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..
Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.
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.
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.
What can be done when you’re eleven can often never be done again.
No good friends, no bad friends; only people you want, need to be with. People who build their houses in your heart.
Swear to me swear to me that if it isn't dead you'll all come back.
Everything's a lot tougher when it's for real. That's when you choke. When it's for real.
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.
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.
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.
Oh Christ, he groaned to himself, if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up
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.
You can't be careful on a skateboard.
I’m the Turtle, son. I made the universe, but please don’t blame me for it; I had a belly-ache.
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.
Seven, Richie thought. That's the magic number. There has to be seven of us. That's the way it's supposed to be.
once you get into cosmological shit like this, you got to throw away the instruction manual
stop now before i kill you a word to the wise from your friend PENNYWISE
But still, sometimes, in the heart of winter when the light outside seemed yellow- sleepy, like a cat curled up on a sofa...
You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for... and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you.
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.

Did you know?

  • It was the best-selling hardcover fiction book in the United States for 1986.
  • The novel won the British Fantasy Award in 1987 and was nominated for the Locus and World Fantasy Awards.
  • The story unfolds across two timelines set twenty-seven years apart, the interval at which the creature It reawakens.
  • King has said he wanted to bring together many of the classic monsters of his childhood into a single work.
  • The antagonist most often manifests as Pennywise the Dancing Clown.

About Stephen King

Stephen King is an American author, born in 1947 in Portland, Maine, widely regarded as a master of horror, suspense, and supernatural fiction. He has published dozens of novels, many of them international bestsellers and the basis for popular film and television adaptations.

More about the author →

About the book

It is a 1986 horror novel by Stephen King set in the fictional town of Derry, Maine. The story alternates between two time periods separated by twenty-seven years, following seven outcast children who call themselves the Losers' Club. As kids in the late 1950s they confront an ancient, shapeshifting evil that most often appears as Pennywise the Dancing Clown, an entity that awakens roughly every twenty-seven years to prey on the town's children. After their first battle they swear a blood oath to return if It ever resurfaces, and as adults they are summoned back to Derry to face the creature once more.

At its heart the novel is about the loss of childhood innocence and the strange, one-way nature of growing up. King interweaves the narratives of the children and the adults they become, exploring memory, fear, friendship, and the way trauma both fades and lingers. Derry itself functions almost as a character, a town whose history is stained by cyclical violence that the adults around the children refuse to see.

One of King's most ambitious and expansive works at over a thousand pages, It became the best-selling hardcover fiction title in the United States for 1986 and won the British Fantasy Award. Its central villain, Pennywise, has become one of the most recognizable figures in modern horror, cemented by a 1990 television miniseries and a hugely successful two-part film adaptation released in 2017 and 2019.

Key characters

  • Bill DenbroughThe Losers' Club's de facto leader, whose younger brother Georgie is killed by It
  • Beverly MarshThe lone girl in the group, resilient and central to their survival
  • Richie TozierThe wisecracking jokester who grows up to be a disc jockey
  • Eddie KaspbrakAn asthmatic, hypochondriac boy who masks real courage
  • Ben HanscomAn overweight boy who becomes a successful architect
  • Mike HanlonThe town historian and librarian who tracks It's cycle and reunites the group
  • PennywiseThe shapeshifting evil entity that preys on Derry's children

Book details

First published
1986
Length
1138 pages
Reading time
69 hours
Genre
Fiction
Goodreads rating
4.24 (1.3M ratings)
First line
“The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years—if it ever did end—began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.”

Movie & TV adaptations

  • IMDb
    It 1990

    Television miniseries starring Tim Curry as Pennywise

  • IMDb
    It 2017

    Feature film covering the childhood timeline

  • IMDb
    It Chapter Two 2019

    Feature film sequel covering the adult timeline

If you liked this, read…

  1. 1
    The StandAnother sprawling Stephen King epic pitting ordinary people against vast evil
  2. 2
    Salem's LotKing's small-Maine-town horror with a lurking supernatural menace
  3. 3
    Summer of NightDan Simmons's tale of children battling an ancient evil in their hometown

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