Quotes from The Dark Half

Stephen King ·  469 pages

Rating: (103.5K votes)


“He didn’t know if that was really true or not, but he discovered something which was tremendously liberating: he didn’t care. He was very tired of thinking and thinking and still not knowing. He was also tired of being frightened, like a man who has entered a cave on a lark and now begins to suspect he is lost. Stop thinking about it, then. That’s the solution.”
― Stephen King, quote from The Dark Half


“But writers INVITE ghosts, maybe; along with actors and
artists, they are the only totally accepted mediums of our society. They make worlds that never
were, populate them with people who never existed, and then invite us to join them in their
fantasies. And we do it, don't we? Yes. We PAY to do it.”
― Stephen King, quote from The Dark Half


“Cut him. Cut him while I stand here and watch. I want to see the blood flow. Don't make me tell you twice.”
― Stephen King, quote from The Dark Half


“...he was after all, a novelist...and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay.”
― Stephen King, quote from The Dark Half


“The George George Stark George Starked over the Starky Stark.”
― Stephen King, quote from The Dark Half



“He sometimes believed that the compulsion to make fiction was no more than a bulwark against confusion, maybe even insanity. It was a desperate imposition of order by people able to find that precious stuff only in their minds . . . never in their hearts.”
― Stephen King, quote from The Dark Half


“I want to make sure I remember what real ugly is. I might want to tell my grandchildren someday.”
― Stephen King, quote from The Dark Half


“Stark lit a Pall Mall himself, picked up one of his Berols, opened his own notebook . . . and then paused. He looked at Thad with naked honesty. “I’m scared, hoss,” he said. And Thad felt a great wave of sympathy for Stark—in spite of everything he knew. Scared. Yes, of course you are, he thought. Only the ones just starting out—the kids—aren’t scared. The years go by and the words on the page don’t get any darker . . . but the white space sure does get whiter. Scared? You’d be crazier than you are if you weren’t. “I know,” he said. “And you know what it comes down to—the only way to do it is to do it.”
― Stephen King, quote from The Dark Half


“«Sa, anch'io gioco un pochino a tennis, e pensavo...»
«Se lei gioca a tennis solo un pochino, allora probabilmente non è al mio livello.»”
― Stephen King, quote from The Dark Half


About the author

Stephen King
Born place: in Portland, Maine, The United States
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“It’s about the dream of second chances,” he says finally. He hasn’t raised his eyes from the paper on his desk and I feel him looking at me without looking when he uses his grandfather’s words. “The narrator doesn’t respect the beauty of life and the world around her, so it crushes her into the ground and once she’s dead, she realizes everything she took for granted and didn’t see right in front of her while she was alive. She’s begging for another chance to live again so she can appreciate it this time.”
“And does she get that chance?” she asks Josh while I desperately focus on the poster of literary terms on the wall and wait for absolution. When it comes, I barely hear it.
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