Needful Things

I'm having a magenta day. Not just red, but magenta!

Everyone loves something for nothing...even if it costs everything.

There were people who lied for gain, people who lied from pain, people who lied simply because the concept of telling the truth was utterly alien to them . . . and then there were people who lied because they were waiting for it to be time to tell the truth.

Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha? She had shaken her head slowly. Men and women who can't get over their past . . . That's what ghosts are.

Love, the simplest, strongest, and most unforgiving of all emotions.

Why is it that so many people think all the answers are in their wallet?

That was what I wanted, but I don't need it to be gone. I can love you and I can love life and bear the pain all at the same time. I think the pain might even make the rest better, the way a good setting can make a diamond look better.

Some tears have to be cried no matter what the hour- until they are, they simply rave and burn inside.

Put an egg in your shoe and beat it, make like a tree and leave, imitate an amoeba and split.

What chance?’ she had asked, bewildered. ‘Your chance. Your chance to live your own life. Right now you have the look of a woman who is seeing ghosts. Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?’ She had shaken her head slowly. ‘Men and women who can’t get over the past,’ Aunt Evvie said. ‘That’s what ghosts are. Not them.’ She flapped her arm toward the coffin which stood on its bands beside the coincidentally fresh grave. ‘The dead are dead. We bury them, and buried they stay.

You must be human . . . how weirdly exotic and excitingly perverse.

Sure. Sure you have. I never forget a face.

In a democracy we sometimes have to put up with things we don't life or approve of.

It was wrong, but sometimes you have to break a few eggs in order to make an omelette.

Hugh stretched out one hand and stroked the fur. It felt cold and rich, it crackled with silky static electricity. Stroking it was like stroking a clear autumn night.

At fifty-one you had to keep running just to escape the avalanche of your own past.

She looks like a woman who just got laid . . . and had about three orgasms.

Because in America, you could have anything you wanted, just as long as you could pay for it. If you couldn't pay, or refused to pay, you would remain needful for ever.

real reason he’d gone was the one most bad decisions have in common: it had seemed like a good idea at the time.

lies and love rarely went together, and never for long.

norris didn't cry, but he was apt to puke on them, the way he had puked on homer gamache that time he had found homer sprawled in a ditch out by homeland cemetary, beaten to death with his own artificial arm.

Ladies and gentlemen, attention, please! Come in close where everyone can see! I got a tale to tell, it isn’t gonna cost a dime! (And if you believe that, we’re gonna get along just fine.)

She sat there all afternoon in her hot maiden’s bedroom, thinking and dreaming in the dark circle which the splinter spread around her, a darkness which was like the hood of a cobra.

It’s like my mother used to say—people have more fun than anybody, except for horses, and they can’t.

A little of everything, that’s what a successful business is all about, Brian. Diversity, pleasure, amazement, fulfillment . . . what a successful life is all about, for that matter . . . I don’t give advice, but if I did, you could do worse than to remember that . . . now let me see . . . somewhere

Castle Rock Middle School was a frowning pile of red brick standing between the Post Office and the Library, a holdover from the time when the town elders didn’t feel entirely comfortable with a school unless it looked like a reformatory.

The first rule of her confrontational life-style was Always get the last word. The second was Always make the first move. Making this first move was what she thought of as Taking Care of Things, and she meant to take care of Nettle in a hurry.

He would have been perfectly at home living in a cave and dragging his woman around by the hair when he wasn't busy throwing rocks at his enemies. He was the sort of man whose response is only completely predictable when he is confronted with superior strength and authority. Confrontations of this kind didn't happen often, but when they did, he bowed to the superior force almost at once. Although he did not know it, it was this characteristic which had kept him from simply running away from the Flying Corson Brothers in the first place. In men like Ace Merrill, the only urge stronger than the urge to dominate is the need to roll over and humbly expose the undefended neck when the real leader of the pack puts in an appearance.