“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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“If you ever know a man who tries to drown his sorrows, kindly inform him his sorrows know how to swim.”
― Pittacus Lore, quote from The Power of Six
“I’m seventeen years old, my name is Juan García Madero, and I’m in my first semester of law school. I wanted to study literature, not law, but my uncle insisted, and in the end I gave in. I’m an orphan, and someday I’ll be a lawyer. That’s what I told my aunt and uncle, and then I shut myself in my room and cried all night.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives
“There are some men who, living with the one object of enriching themselves, no matter by what means, and being perfectly conscious of the baseness and rascality of the means which they will use every day towards this end, affect nevertheless—even to themselves—a high tone of moral rectitude, and shake their heads and sigh over the depravity of the world. Some of the craftiest scoundrels that ever walked this earth, or rather—for walking implies, at least, an erect position and the bearing of a man—that ever crawled and crept through life by its dirtiest and narrowest ways, will gravely jot down in diaries the events of every day, and keep a regular debtor and creditor account with Heaven, which shall always show a floating balance in their own favour. Whether this is a gratuitous (the only gratuitous) part of the falsehood and trickery of such men's lives, or whether they really hope to cheat Heaven itself, and lay up treasure in the next world by the same process which has enabled them to lay up treasure in this—not to question how it is, so it is. And, doubtless, such book-keeping (like certain autobiographies which have enlightened the world) cannot fail to prove serviceable, in the one respect of sparing the recording Angel some time and labour.”
― Charles Dickens, quote from Nicholas Nickleby
“You'll never find a man on Earth, if a god leads him on, who can escape his fate.”
― Sophocles, quote from The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus Rex/Oedipus at Colonus/Antigone
“What made me pause here was the pure dichotomy.”
― Harlan Coben, quote from Tell No One
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