Kelsey Haeuser > Kelsey's Quotes

“They understood that. They all understood it. This is not the same as comprehension, but it was good enough. When you stop to think, the whole idea of comprehension has a faintly archaic taste, like the sound of forgotten tongues or a look into a Victorian camera obscura. We Americans are much higher on simple understanding. It makes it easier to read the billboards when you're heading into town on the expressway at plus-fifty. To comprehend, the mental jaws have to gape wide enough to make the tendons creak. Understanding, however, can be purchased on every paperback-book rack in America.”
― Stephen King, Rage

“Mr. Grace sounded like a very small child, helpless, hopeless. I had made him fuck himself with his own big tool, like one of those weird experiences you read about in the Penthouse Forum. I had taken off his witch doctor's mask and made him human. But I didn't hold it against him. To err is only human, but it's divine to forgive. I believe that sincerely.”
― Richard Bachman, Rage

“Sanity:
You can go through your whole life telling yourself that life is logical, life is prosaic, life is sane. Above all, sane. And I think it is. I've had a lot of time to think about that...
I think; therefore I am. There are hairs on my face; therefore I shave. My wife and child have been critically injured in a car crash; therefore I pray. It's all logical, it's all sane.
...there's a Mr. Hyde for every happy Jekyll face, a dark face on the other side of the mirror... You turn the mirror sideways and see your face reflected with a sinister left-hand twist, half mad and half sane.
...No one looks at that side unless they have to, and I can understand that.
...I'm the sane one.”
― Richard Bachman (Pseudonym), Stephen King, Rage

“When you're five and you hurt, you make a big noise in the world. At ten you whimper. But by the time you make fifteen you begin to eat the poisoned apples that grow on your own inner tree of pain.”
― Stephen King, Rage

“Lunacy is when you can’t see the seams where they stitched the world together anymore.”
― Stephen King as Richard Bachman, Rage

“They're animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?”
― Stephen King, The Long Walk

“Any game looks straight if everyone is being cheated at once.”
― Stephen King, The Long Walk

“The good folks mostly win, courage usually triumphs over fear, the family dog hardly ever contracts rabies: these are things I knew at twenty-five, and things I still know now, at the age of 25 x 2. But I know something else as well: there's a place in most of us where the rain is pretty much constant, the shadows are always long, and the woods are full of monsters. It is good to have a voice in which the terrors of such a place can be articulated and its geography partially described, without denying the sunshine and clarity that fill so much of our ordinary lives. (viii)”
― Stephen King, The Long Walk

“Thinking, Garraty thought. That’s the day’s business. Thinking. Thinking and isolation, because it doesn’t matter if you pass the time of day with someone or not; in the end, you’re alone.”
― Stephen King, The Long Walk

“I don't want to see it anymore. It's lousy. And it's a cheat. You build it all around something... set yourself on something... and then you don't want it. Isn't it too bad the great truths are all such lies?”
― Stephen King, The Long Walk

“It's like practicing pole vaulting your entire life, and then getting to the olympics and saying, ‘what the hell did I want to jump over this stupid bar for?”
― Stephen King (Richard Bachman), The Long Walk

“But of course it had hurt. It had hurt before, in the worst, rupturing way, knowing there would be no more you but the universe would roll on just the same, unharmed and unhampered.”
― Stephen King, The Long Walk

“The crowd could not know that they were cheering but somehow they did, somehow they understood that the circle between death-worship and death-wish had been completed for another year and the crowd went completely loopy, convulsing itself in greater and greater paroxysms.”
― Stephen King, The Long Walk

“Crowd was to be pleased. Crowd was to be worshipped and feared. Ultimately, Crowd was to be made sacrifice unto.”
― Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

“You think just knowing about death will keep you from dying?”
― Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

“The dead are orphans. No company but the silence like a moth's wing. An end to the agony of movement, to the long nightmare of going down the road. The body in peace, stillness, and order. The perfect darkness of death.”
― Richard Bachman, The Long Walk

“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.”
― Stephen King, ’Salem’s Lot

“There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.”
― Stephen King, 'Salem's Lot

“Corey Bryant sank into a great forgetful river, and that river was time, and its waters were red.”
― Stephen King, ’Salem’s Lot