’Salem’s Lot

But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.

God grant me to SERENITY to accept what I cannot change the TENACITY to change what I may and the GOOD LUCK not to fuck up too often

The basis of all human fears, he thought. A closed door, slightly ajar.

The town has a sense, not of history, but of time, and the telephone poles seem to know this. If you lay your hand against one, you can feel the vibration from the wires deep within the wood, as if souls had been imprisoned in there and were struggling to get out.

If a fear cannot be articulated, it can’t be conquered.

The town kept its secrets, and the Marsten House brooded over it like a ruined king.

Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us.

There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.

At three in the morning the blood runs slow and thick, and slumber is heavy. The soul either sleeps in blessed ignorance of such an hour or gazes about itself in utter despair. There is no middle ground.

The essential and defining characteristic of childhood is not the effortless merging of dream and reality, but only alienation. There are no words for childhood's dark turns and exhalations. A wise child recognizes it and submits to the necessary consequences. A child who counts the cost is a child no longer.

The sandwich he made was bologna and cheese, his favorite. All the sandwiches he made were his favorites; that was one of the advantages of being single.

Before drifting away entirely, he found himself reflecting---not for the first time---on the peculiarity of adults. Thet took laxatives, liquor, or sleeping pills to drive away their terrors so that sleep would come, and their terrors were so tame and domestic: the job, the money, what the teacher will think if I can't get Jennie nicer clothes, does my wife still love me, who are my friends. They were pallid compared to the fears every child lies cheek and jowl with in his dark bed, with no one to confess to in hope of perfect understanding but another child. There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.

Crying was like pissing everything out on the ground.

small towns have long memories and pass their horrors down ceremonially from generation to generation.

Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration.

If a man dethrones God in his heart, Satan must ascend to His position.

Ben smiled back, 'Mark Twain said a novel was a confession to everything by a man who had never done anything.

I think it's relatively easy for people to accept something like telepathy or precognition or teleplasm because their willingness to believe doesn't cost them anything. It doesn't keep them awake nights. But the idea that the evil that men do lives after them is unsettling.

The town knew about darkness. It knew about the darkness that comes on the land when rotation hides the land from the sun, and about the darkness of the human soul

And all around them, the bestiality of the night rises on tenebrous wings. The vampire’s time has come.

To his way of thinking, the only thing more natural than death was sex.

That above all else. They did not look out their windows. No matter what noises or dreadful possibilities, no matter how awful the unknown, there was an even worse thing: to look the Gorgon in the face.

There were fourteen steps exactly fourteen. But the top one was smaller, out of proportion, as if it had been added to avoid the evil number.

The town cares for devil’s work no more than it cares for God’s or man’s. It knew darkness. And darkness was enough.

Corey Bryant sank into a great forgetful river, and that river was time, and its waters were red.

Writing controlled fiction is called “plotting.” Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however…that is called “storytelling.” Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration.

It had that comfortably sprung, lived-in look that library books with a lively circulation always get; bent page corners, a dab of mustard on page 331, a whiff of some reader's spilled after-dinner whiskey on page 468. Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us, how good stories abide, unchanged and mutely wise, while we poor humans grow older and slower.

She had always consciously or unconsciously formed fear into a simple equation: fears = unknown.

Things were going very fast now. Too fast to suit him. Fantasy and reality had merged.

But when fall comes, kicking summer out on it's treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed.