Elfy Lyons > Elfy's Quotes

“Your hair is winter fire
January embers
My heart burns there, too.”
― Stephen King, It

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
― Stephen King

“Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on.”
― Stephen King, Bag of Bones

“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...”
― Stephen King

“Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.”
― Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

“Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

“Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?

She had shaken her head slowly.

Men and women who can't get over their past . . . That's what ghosts are.”
― Stephen King, Needful Things

“- The scariest, most terrifying thing that I fear?'
- Yes.
- My Imagination.
- I thought you were going to say "Fear, itself."
- Then you have a small imagination.”
― Stephen King, The Drawing of the Three

“Because the difference between seeing and not seeing can be the difference between living and dying.”
― Stephen King, The Drawing of the Three

“Control the things you can control, maggot. Let everything else take a flying fuck at you and if you must go down, go down with your guns blazing.”
― Stephen King, The Drawing of the Three

“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 your momma does and so do I.”
― Stephen King, The Shining

“Tough old world, baby. If you're not bolted together tightly, you're gonna shake, rattle, and roll before you turn thirty.”
― Stephen King, The Shining

“Small children are great accepters. They don’t understand shame, or the need to hide things.”
― Stephen King, The Shining

“We sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives.”
― Stephen King, The Shining

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Look- here's a table covered with red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes. [...] On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8. [...] The most interesting thing here isn't even the carrot-munching rabbit in the cage, but the number on its back. Not a six, not a four, not nineteen-point-five. It's an eight. This is what we're looking at, and we all see it. I didn't tell you. You didn't ask me. I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We're not even in the same year together, let alone the same room... except we are together. We are close. We're having a meeting of the minds. [...] We've engaged in an act of telepathy. No mythy-mountain shit; real telepathy.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower