I love King's little asides and observations. This book alone has a wealth of quotability. I've posted some, but to prevent spam, I'm gathering them all here.
Grief is like a drunken houseguest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.
Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts
My first editor used to say that eighty-five per cent of what goes on in a novelist’s head is none of his business, a sentiment I’ve never believed should be restricted to just writers. So-called higher thought is, by and large, highly overrated.
Humor is almost always anger with its makeup on, I think, but in little towns the makeup tends to be thin.
There's something creepy about any repeating dream, I think, about knowing your subconscious is digging obsessively at some object that won't be dislodged.
It was a sense that reality is thin. I think it is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.
This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root-canal at a time; boat-builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things—fish and unicorns and men on horseback—but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.
I think houses live their own lives along a time-stream that's different from the ones upon which their owners float, one that's slower. In a house, especially an old one, the past is closer.
Any good marriage is secret territory, a necessary white space on society's map. What others don't know about it is what makes it yours.
Sometimes things work just because you think they work. It's as good a definition of faith as any.
Still, I understood her. I read the words off her lips if you prefer the rational, right out of her mind if you prefer the romantical. I prefer the latter. Marriage is a zone, too, you know. Marriage is a zone. — So that's all right, isn't it?
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