Stephen King Quotes (302 Quotes)

I believe that the combination of pencil and memory creates a kind of practical magic, and magic is dangerous.

Few if any seemed to have grasped the Principle of Reality; new knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries. Greater physiological knowledge of the brain makes the existence of the soul less possible yet more probable by the nature of the search.

The wind moaned, a witch with cancer in her belly.

Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.

Develop a little self-righteousness. A lot of that is an ugly thing, God knows, but a little applied over all your scruples is an absolute necessity! It is to the soul what a good sun-block is to the skin during the heat of summer.

Men who find themselves late are never sure. They are all the things the civics books tell us the good citizen should be: partisans but never zealots, respectors of the facts which attend each situation but never benders of those facts, uncomfortable in positions of leadership but rarely unable to turn down a responsibility once it has been offered . . . or thrust upon them. They make the best leaders in a democracy because they are unlikely to fall in love with power.

Women's lib, Frannie had decided, was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn't get with child, but a woman could---every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath.

She did not know if her gift came from the lord of light or of darkness, and now, finally finding that she didn't care which, she wad overcome with almost indescribable relief, as if a huge weight, long carried, had slipped from her shoulders.

And this wasn't lying, not really. It was leaving out.

Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls-Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his face in her heart all the time, a kind of sweet, hurtful ache. She would have died for him..

Seven, Richie thought. That's the magic number. There has to be seven of us. That's the way it's supposed to be.

DonÆt go beyond, no matter how much you feel you need to, Doctor. The barrier was not made to be broken. Remember this: there is more power here than you know. It is old and always restless. Remember.

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.

I've met talespinners before, Jake, and they're all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they're afraid of life.

I think that's what people most always do with the stuff they can't make out - just forget it.

First comes smiles, then lies. Last is gunfire.-Roland Deschain, of Gilead

The woman who preaches has poison religion. Let the respectable ones go

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.

Nobody likes to see a stupid guy wise up.

You couldn't not like someone who liked the guitar.

Sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It's what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutter ball when you're bowling with the girls in the league. True sorrow is as rare as true love.

Anything with the power to make you laugh over thirty years later isn't a waste of time. I think something like that is very close to immortality.

Come on back and we'll see if you remember the simplest thing of all - how it is to be children, secure in belief and thus afraid of the dark.

So exquisitely slopped that he didn't know if he was on land or at sea.

It's like many other things in life, Ellie. You keep on the path and all's well. You get off it and the next thing you know you're lost if you're not lucky.

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.

May you find your Tower, Roland, and breach it, and may you climb to the top!

I'm rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I'm tired of bein on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain. Not never havin no buddy to go on with or tell me where we's comin from or goin to or why. I'm tired of people bein ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I'm tired of all the times I've wanted to help and couldn't. I'm tired of bein in the dark. Mostly it's the pain. There's too much. If I could end it, I would. But I can't.

Friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of regard.

Their faces were zealously blank, their eyes filled with bland fire.

Are you sure self-pity is a luxury you can afford, Jack?

For God's sake, Larry, grow up. Develop a little self-righteousness. A lot of that is an ugly thing, God knows, but a little spread over all your scruples is an absolute necessity!

People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.

Your first impulse is to share good news, your second is to club someone with it.

Sorry is the KoolAid of human emotions.

Friends don't spy; true friendship is about privacy, too.

Disquiet and desire. What you want and what you're scared to try for. Where you've been and where you want to go. Something in a rock-and-roll song about wanting the girl, the car, the place to stand and be. Oh please God can you dig it.

Swear to me swear to me that if it isn't dead you'll all come back.

May be sheÆll learn something about what death really is, which is where the pain stops and the good memories begin. Not the end of life but the end of pain.

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.

Our time here is brief, our risk enormous. Don't waste the one or increase the other, if you please.

It's strange how pain marks our faces, and makes us look like family.

Go now, there are other worlds than these

There was murder, there was rape, there were unspeakable practices, and all of them were for the good, the bloody good, the bloody myth, for the grail, for the Tower.

He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.

God doesn't bribe, child. He just makes a sign and lets people take it as they will.

Rationalism is the idea that we can ever understand anything about the state of being. It's a deathtrip. It always has been. . . . And if rationalism is a deathtrip, then irrationalism might very well be a lifetrip . . . at least until it proves otherwise.

As his mouth flooded with that horrible sweet purple taste, he could actually see those grapes dull, dusty, obese and nasty, crawling up a dirty stucco wall in a thick, syrupy sunlight that was silent except for the stupid buzz of many flies

The low bird is not picked tenderly out of the dust by its fellows; rather, it is dispatched quickly and without mercy.