"Life is a fine thing, Nick, but old age takes an unpleasantly high toll on one's dearly held prejudices, I find."
The Stand Bk 1, Ch.18, p.144

She might evenn stop somewhere and have a glass of beer. Happiness in a bottle. Equilibrium, anyway.
The StandBk 1, Ch.20, p.156

When your lover begins to talk about "offending" you, he's not your lover anymore.
The Stand Bk 1, Ch. 20, p.158

I have always believed...that dreams are the psyche's way of taking a good dump every now and then. And that people who don't dream...are mentally constipated in some way.
The Stand Bk 1, Ch.37, p.335

Shall I tell you what sociology teaches us about the human race? I'll give it to you in a nutshell. Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call "society." Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.
The Stand Bk 1, Ch.42, p.375

No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just...come out the other side.
The Stand Bk 2, Ch.44, p.435

God is great, God is good; the littlest child could learn those words, and they encompassed the whole world and all the world held, good and evil.
The Stand Bk 2, Ch.45, p.469

But no one knows how long five minutes is in the dark; it might be fair to say that, in the dark, five minutes does not exist.
The Stand Bk 2, Ch.48, p.588

The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...or change...Religious mania is one of the few infallible ways of responding to the world's vagaries, because it totally eliminates pure accident. To the true religious maniac, it's all on purpose.
The Stand Bk. 2, Ch.48, p.607

God the Creator had made man in His own image, and that meant that every man and woman who dwelt under God's light was a creator of some kind, a person with an urge to stretch out his hand and shape the world into some rational pattern. The black man wanted -- was able -- only to unshape. Anti-Christ? You might as well say anti-creation.
The Stand Bk.2, Ch.50, p.642

The father of sin was theft; ever one of the Ten Commandments boiled down to "Thou shalt not steal." Murder was theft of a life, adultery the theft of a wife, covetousness was the secret, slinking theft that took place in the cave of the heart. Blasphemy was the theft of God's name, swiped from the House of the Lord and sent out to walk the streets like a strutting whore...The mother of sin was pride.
The Stand Bk. 2, Ch.50, p.645

Superstition, like true love, needs time to grow and reflect on itself.
The Stand Bk. 2, Ch.52, p.729

The business of virgins is always deadly serious -- not pleasure but experience.
The Stand Bk. 2, Ch.54, p.792

Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long.
And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again.
The Stand Epilogue, p.1141

...at 4:15 a.m., anything seems possible. Anything
I think anyone who's stayed up late at night talking with friends can agree with this :) Insomina Ch.1, p.39

Back then, the idea of 'coming out of the closet' was ridiculous. For most of us the closet was all there was. Unless you wanted a pack of liquored-up fraternity boys sitting on you in an alley and trying to pull your face off, the world was your closet.
Insomnia Ch.6, pt.2, p.178

I think home's just one of those things that happens to a person, like their complexion or the color of their eyes.
Insomnia Ch.6, pt. 5, p. 192

Random is crazy. Purpose is sane.
Insomnia Ch.23, pt. 3, p.588

...perhaps real beauty was something unrecognized by the conscious self, a work that was always in progress, a thing of being rather than seeing.
Insomnia Ch. 27, pt. 1, p. 672

All lives are different. All of them matter or none matter.
Insomnia Ch. 27, pt. 6, p. 684

For [humans] there is always a choice. We find that frightening...but we also find it beautiful.
Insomnia Ch. 30, pt. 7, p. 736

...when I open my mouth, something always seems to fall out...It's one of my two great talents, the other being the ability to clean out an entire Whitman's Sampler during a two-hour TV movie.
Insomnia Ch. 30, pt. 8, p. 740

...there were...years of haircuts and permanents, storms and senior proms, coffee and cigarettes, steak dinners...and hotdogs at the Little League field. Girls and boys fell in love, drunks fell out of cars, short skirts fell out of favor. People reshingled their roofs and repaved their driveways. Old bums were voted out of office; new bums were voted it. It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in awhile exhilarating. The fundamental things continued to apply as time went by.
Insomnia Epilogue, pt. 7, p. 761

Just life, going on as it always does -- which is to say mostly between the lines and outside the margins.
Insomnia Epilogue, pt. 8, p. 762

...guys like us, Red, we know there's a third choice. An alternative to staying simon-pure or bathing in the filth and the slime. It's the alternative that grown-ups all over the world pick...You choose the lesser of two evils and try to keep your good intentions in front of you. And I guess you jubge how well you're doing by how well you sleep at night...and what your dreams are like.
"Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" Different Seasons p. 53

He had a Bible quote for every occasion...and whenever you meet a man like that, my best advice to you would be to grin big and cover up your balls with both hands.
"Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" Different Seasons p.56

Things come in three major degrees in the human experience, I think. There's good, bad, and terrible. And as you go down into progressive darkness toward terrible, it gets harder and harder to make subdivisions.
Actually I personally believe that there's a few ranks that exist above "good" but I like this thought. "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" Different Seasons p.67

...hope is a good thing...maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.
"Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" Different Seasons p.105

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out...And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays lock within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.
"The Body" Different Seasons Ch. 1 p. 289

The most important things are the hardest to say, because words dimish them. It's hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life.
"The Body" Different Seasons Ch. 20 p.390

The only reason anyone writes stories is so they can understand the past and get ready for some future mortality; that's why all the verbs in stories have -ed endings...The only two useful artforms are religion and stories.
"The Body" Different Seasons Ch. 21 p. 395

Speech destroys the functions of love...If you speak to tell a deer you mean it no harm, it glides away with a single flip of its tail. The word is the harm...Love has teeth; they bite; the wounds never close. No word, no combination of words, can close these lovebites. It's the other way around, that's the joke. If those wounds dry up, the words die with them.
"The Body" Different Seasons Ch. 29 p. 423

Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgice, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just indifferent but ugly...perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is a real sickness -- the ache of the uprooted plant.
As I found out when I first left for college. "The Breathing Method" Different Seasons part II p. 474

...the way things should be and the way things are hardly ever get together. The world's a hard place, Danny. It don't care. It don't hate you and me, but it don't love us, either. Terrible things happen in the world, and they're things no one can explain. Good people die in bad, painful ways and leave the folks that love them all alone. Sometimes it seems like it's only the bad people who stay healthy and prosper. The world don't love you...But see that you get on. That's your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what.
The Shining Chapter 58 p. 416

"It's been my experience that ninety-five percent of the people who walk the earth are simply inert, Johnny. One percent are saints, and one percent are assholes. The other three percent are the people who do what they say they can do."
The Dead Zone Chapter 19 pt. ii p.285

He more than half suspected that one of the things which had kept their marriage together when it seemed as if each year brought the news that two or three of their friends' marriages had collapsed was their respect of the mystery -- the half-grasped but never spoken idea that maybe, when you got right down to the place where the cheese binds, there was no such thing as marriage, no such thing as a union, that each soul stood alone and ultimately defied rationality. That was the mystery. And no matter how well you thought you knew your partner, you occasionally ran into blank walls or fell into pits. And sometimes (rarely, thank God) you ran into a full-fledged pocket of alien strangeness, something like the clear-air turbulence that can buffet an airliner for no reason at all. An attitude or belief which you had never suspected, one so peculiar (at least to you) that it seemed nearly psychotic. And then you trod lightly, if you valued your marriage and your peace of mind; you tried to remember that anger at such a discovery was the province of fools who really believed it was possible for one mind to know another.
Pet Sematary Chapter 9 p.53

"Maybe she'll 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."
Pet Sematary Chapter 26 p.167

But time passes, and time welds one state of human feeling into another until they become something like a rainbow. Strong grief becomes a softer,more mellow grief; mellow grief becomes mourning; mourning at last becomes rememberance -- a process that may take from six months to three years and it can still be considered normal.
Pet Sematary Chapter 34 p.219

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