“A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
“There are things of such darkness and horror—just, I suppose, as there are things of such great beauty—that they will not fit through the puny human doors of perception.”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
“Even a zombie lurching through the night can seem pretty cheerful compared to the existential comedy/horror of the ozone layer dissolving under the combined assault of a million fluorocarbon spray cans of deodorant.”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
“You may wonder about long-term solutions. I assure you, there are none. All wounds are mortal. Take what's given. You sometimes get a little slack in the rope but the rope always has an end. So what? Bless the slack and don't waste your breath cursing the drop. A grateful heart knows that in the end we all swing.”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
“I have a real problem with bloat -- I write like fat ladies diet.”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
“Grab onto my arm now. Hold tight. We are going into a number of dark places, but I think I know the way. Just don't let go of my arm. And if I should kiss you in the dark, it's no big deal; it's only because you are my love.”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
“even the most well-adjusted person is holding on to his or her sanity by a greased rope.”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
“That rational voice was right to be frightened. There's something in us that is very much attracted to madness. Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall building has felt a faint, morbid urge to jump.”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
“I sit on the bench in front of Bell's Market and think about Homer Buckland and about the beautiful girl who leaned over to open his door when he come down that path with the full red gasoline can in his right hand - she looked like a girl of no more than sixteen, a girl on her learner's permit, and her beauty was terrible, but I believe it would no longer kill the man it turned itself on; for a moment her eyes lit on me, I was not killed, although a part of me died at her feet." (from the short story Mrs. Todd's Shortcut)”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
“As Lily Cavenaugh says in The Talisman (and it was Peter Straub's line, not mine), "You can never be too thin or too rich." And if you don't believe it, you were never really fat or really poor.”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
“... the subconscious leaves its fingerprints, but there's a stranger down there, too. A hell of a weird guy who knows a hell of a lot. (Ballad of the Flexible Bullet)”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
“Leaving for the night, it came to me. What I should have told her. Life goes on - that's what I should have said. That's what you say to people when a loved one dies. But, thinking it over, I was glad I didn't. Because maybe that's what she was afraid of.”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
“All the same, you don’t do it for money, or you’re a monkey. You don’t think of the bottom line, or you’re a monkey. You don’t think of it in terms of hourly wage, yearly wage, even lifetime wage, or you’re a monkey. In the end you don’t even do it for love, although it would be nice to think so. You do it because to not do it is suicide.”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
“Yes, I love; I have loved, anyway, or at least tried to love, but memory is so wide and so deep, and I cannot cross.”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
“One man may shoot himself in the forehead with a .38 and wake up in the hospital. Another may shoot himself in the forehead with a .22 and wake up in hell...if there is such a place. I tend to believe it's here on earth, possibly in New Jersey.”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
“I could tell you that dying's an art / and I am learning fast.”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
“Garish could see Rollins lying dead in a ditch with maggots in his eyes. Rollins wouldn't care. Neither would the maggots. You either ate the world or the world ate you and it was okay either way.”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
“You, my dear ... have been wondering why she stuck with him. Although you haven't said as much, it's been on your mind. Am I right?'
She nodded.
'Yes. And I'm not going to offer a long motivational thesis - the convenient thing about stories that are true is that you need only say this is what happened and let people worry for themselves about why. Generally, nobody ever knows why things happen anyway ... particularly the ones who say they do. (Ballad of the Flexible Bullet)”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
“I didn't see anybody I knew and I began to feel lonely, but pleasantly so. I was at that stage of the evening where you fantasize that everyone is looking at you, the romantic stranger, out of the corners of their eyes.”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
“I kept telling myself: Cold roast beef. Cold roast beef. Cold roast beef.”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
“Then she laughed, kind of soft, and she gave me a kiss. That was the best kiss I ever had in my whole life. It was just on the cheek, and it was the chaste kiss of a married woman, but it was as ripe as a peach, or like those flowers that open in the dark, and when her lips touched my skin I felt like...I don't know exactly what I felt like, because a man can't easily hold on to those things that happened to him with a girl who was ripe when the world was young or how those things felt...Those things all get a red cast to them in your memory and you cannot see through it at all.”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
“There’s something powerful about knowing the shortest way, even if you take the longer way because you know your mother-in-law is sitting home.”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
“'Do you love?' This question had begun to plague her, and she did not even know what it meant.”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
“He proved, back in 1923, that a man couldn't run a mile in under four minutes. He proved that. But people do it all the time, and do you know what that means? It means that no blue ribbon is forever. Someday—if the world doesn't explode itself in the meantime—someone will run a two-minute mile in the Olympics. It may take a hundred years or a thousand, but it will happen. Because there is no ultimate blue ribbon. There is zero, and there is eternity, and there is mortality, but there is no ultimate.”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
“These are things made for thinking on slowly, ... Things to be thought on at length, while the hands do their work and the coffee sits in a solid china mug nearby.
Do the Dead Sing”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
“And that night he dreamed of the monkey again, one of its cymbals striking the Philco radio as it babbled out Dean Martin singing Whenna da moon hitta you eye like a big pizza pie ats-a moray, the radio tumbling into the bathtub as the monkey grinned and beat its cymbals together with a JANG and a JANG and a JANG; only it wasn’t the Italian rag-man who was in the tub when the water turned electric. It was him. •”
― Stephen King, quote from Skeleton Crew
Stephen King
Born place: in Portland, Maine, The United States
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“The first rule of fight club is don’t tell anyone about fight club... Brad Pitt.”
― Luke Young, quote from Friends With Partial Benefits
“The characteristic sounds of a trumpet, oboe, banjo, piano, or violin are due to the distinct cocktail of harmonic frequencies that each instrument produces. I love the image of an invisible cosmic bartender, expert in creating hundreds of different harmonic cocktails, who can serve up a banjo to this customer, a kettledrum to the next, and an erhu or a trombone to the one after that”
― Walter Lewin, quote from For the Love of Physics: From the End of the Rainbow to the Edge of Time: A Journey Through the Wonders of Physics
“You and your rugged sexuality better scoot over,” I whispered. “Unless you want to be responsible for making me pass out on this plane. I’m not sure that flight attendant knows CPR.”
“It’s okay,” he said, lowering his lips all the way to my ear so they touched my skin when he spoke. “I’m really good at mouth-to-mouth.”
Holy shit.”
― Lily Paradis, quote from Ignite
“So you’re left scratching your noggin, wondering how to convert them to your singularly valid viewpoint, which can be mind-numbingly frustrating. Don’t worry, though, you needn’t get on the same page right way; you need only understand you both have your reasons for being on separate pages.”
― Joshua Fields Millburn, quote from Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life
“may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old
may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young
and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile”
― E.E. Cummings, quote from Complete Poems, 1904-1962
The Marble Collector
Fall for Anything
The Festival of Insi...
Candide: or, Optimis...
Normal
The Ski BumBookQuoters 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.
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