"It all floats down here!"

"Come to the book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it and draw your own map."

"True sorrow is as rare as true love."

"The sun had bled away every smell and left nothing."

"There was nothing - and nothing - and then the car bumped up again. There was a muffled pop, the sound of a small pumpkin exploding in a microwave oven.Morris cut the wheel to the left and there was another bump as the Biscayne went back into the parking area. He looked in the mirror and saw that Curtis's head was gone."

"Americans are apocalyptic by nature. The reason why is that we've always had so much, so we live in deadly fear that people are going to take it away from us."

"Time takes it all whether you want it to or not, time takes it all. Time bares it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again."

"It's best to be ruthless with the past."

"Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when if feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position."

"You know what talent is? The curse of expectation. As a kid you have to deal with that, beat it somehow. If you can write, you think God put you on earth to blow Shakespeare away. Or if you can paint, maybe you think--I did--that God put you on earth to blow your father away."

"Bill Hodges is her touchstone, the way she measures her ability to interact with the world. Which is only another way of saying that he is the way she measures her sanity. Trying to imagine her life with him gone is like standing on top of a skyscraper and looking at the sidewalk sixty stories below."

"I used to hammer away at the idea of simplicity.In both fiction and non-fiction, there's only one question and one answer. 'What happened?' the reader asks. 'This is what happened,' the writer responds. 'This...and this...and this, too.' Keep it simple. It's the only sure way home."

"I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses."

"No, it's not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside."

"Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym."

"I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction."

"The best part, though, was hearing my mother's voice. It was like having her again, coming out from far inside me. It hurt, of course, but more often than not the best things do, I've found. You wouldn't think it could be so, but-as the oldtimers used to say - the world's titled, and there's an end to it."

"Such an ego simply forbade certain lines of thought."

"Lend me your wings, bird. I'll spread them and fly on the thermals."

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it harmonizes, and what it usually makes is the devil's music."

"The word is only a representation of the meaning; even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning. Given that, why in God's name would you want to make things words by choosing a word which is only cousin to the one you really wanted to use?"

"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."

"There was a madness in my story, but it was a madness I understood."

"Every man or woman who loves [God], they hate Him too, because He's a hard God, a jealous God, He Is, what He Is, and in this world He's apt to repay service with pain while those who do evil ride over the roads in Cadillac cars. Even the joy of serving Him is a bitter joy."

"Sometimes when you're young, you have moments of such happiness, you think you're living on someplace magical, like Atlantis must have been. Then we grow up and our hearts break into two."

"Fantasy fiction is essentially about the concept of power great fantasy fiction is about people who find it at great cost or lose it tragically mediocre fantasy fiction is about people who have it and never lose it but simply wield it."

"And as I thought about the body of Ray Brower in this light- or lack of it- what I felt was not queasiness or fear that he would suddenly appear before us, a green and gibbering banshee whose purpose was to drive us back the way we had come before we could disturb his- its- peace,but a sudden and unexpected wash of pity that he should be so alone and so defenceless in the dark that was now coming over our side of the world."

"People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy... and I keep it in a jar on my desk."

"She felt like Captain Ahab, for the first time sighting his great white whale."

"The trouble with living alone, she had discovered-and the reason why most people she knew didn't like to be alone even for a little while-was that the longer you lived alone, the louder the voices on the right side of your brain got."

"Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty."

"And in real life endings aren't always neat, whether they're happy endings, or whether they're sad endings."

"George, I'm sorry! he cried through his tears. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, please, I'm suh-suh-SORRY- And then they were around him, his friends, and no one lit a match, and someone held him, he didn't know who, Beverly maybe, or maybe Ben, or Richie. They were with him, and for that little while the darkness was kind."

"Also, I'm angry. I know life is hard, I think everyone knows that in their hearts, but why does it have to be cruel, as well? Why does it have to bite?"

"Monsters are real and ghosts are real too they live inside us and sometimes they win."

"I wonder how much- or how little- they remember. I am somehow convinced that they don't remember any of it, because they don't need to remember. I'm the only one that hears the voice of the Turtle, the only one who remembers, because I'm the only one who stayed here in Derry. And because they're scattered to the four winds, they have no way of knowing the identical patterns their lives have taken. To bring them back, to show them that pattern....yes, it might kill some of them. It might kill all of them."

"The feel of the sticky wetness down there when she moved made her grimace. God, she wanted to get cleaned up. In a hurry."

"I can't understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there's already so much pain in the world."

"The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green pastures. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung-fu in the face of my enemies. Amen."

"You are the grim, goal-oriented ones who will not believe that the joy is in the journey rather than the destination no matter how many times it has been proven to you."

"Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up."

"The sun had burned through and the day had gone from dull to dazzling, yet in the west blask-satin thunderheads continued to stack up. It was as if night has burst a blood-vessel in the sky over there."

"Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open."

"There's always a choice. That's God's way, always will be. Your will is still free. Do as you will. There's no set of leg-irons on you. But... this is what God wants of you."

"He began to cry, not hysterically or screaming as people cry when concealed rage with tears, but with continuous sobs who has just discovered that he's alone and will be for long. He cried because safety and reason seemed to have left the world. Loneliness was a reality, but in this situation madness was also remotely a possibility."

"Do they see the lethal insanity of a race to the brink of oblivion, and then over the edge? Apparently not. If they did, surely they wouldn't be racing to begin with. Or is it a simple failure of imagination? One doesn't like to think such a rudimentary failing could bring about the end, yet..."

"I had been hobbled, perhaps even crippled by a pervasive internet society I had come to depend on and take for granted... hit enter and let Google, that twenty-first century Big Brother, take care of the rest.In the Derry of 1958, the most up-to-date computers were the size of small housing developments, and the local paper was no help. What did that leave? I remembered a sociology prof I'd had in college - a sarcastic old bastard - who used to say, When all else fails, give up and go to the library."

"Life could sometimes be grand."

"Until that afternoon in October four years ago, I hadn't known dogs could scream."

"Maybe there's a whole other universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything."