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Stephen King Quotes

Browse 343 quotes about Stephen King.

Stephen King Quotes

“The trouble with dogs (supposing you don't beat or kick them, of course) is they trust you. you're the food-giver and shelter-provider. You're the one that can fish the squeaky monkey out from beneath the couch with one of your clever five-fingered paws. You are also the love-giver. The problem with that kind of unquestioning trust is that it carries a weight of responsibility. Mostly that's okay. In our current situation it was anything but.”

“He had suspected something, yes. But suspecting was not like knowing; he knew that now, if nothing else. He could write an essay on the difference between suspecting and knowing. What made it doubly cruel was the fact that he had really begun to believe that the suspicions were groundless. And even if they weren’t, what you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you. Wasn’t that right? If a man is crossing a darkened room with a deep, open hole in the middle of it, and if he passes within inches of it, he doesn’t need to know he almost fell in. There is no need for fear. Not if the lights are off.”

“That was the power of radio at its height. The Shadow, we were assured at the beginning of each episode, had "The power to cloud men's minds." It strikes me that, when it comes to fiction in the media, it is television and movies which so often cloud that part of our minds where the imagination moves most fruitfully; they do so by imposing the dictatorship of the visual set.”

“Rings and magazines; keychains and umbrellas; hats and glasses; rattles and radios. They looked like different things, but Ralph thought they were really all the same thing: the faint, sorrowing voices of people who had found themselves written out of the script in the middle of the second act while they were still learning their lines for the third, people who had been unceremoniously hauled off before their work was done or their obligations fulfilled, people whose only crime had been to be born in the Random... and to have caught the eye of the madman with the rusty scalpel.”

“Besides, finding out something like that would have killed my mother." And then Jessie had known she was going to explode if she didn't get out of there. So she had gotten up, springing out of her chair so fast she had almost knocked the ugly, bulky thing over. She had sprinted from the room, knowing they were all looking at her, not caring. What they thought didn't matter. What mattered was that the sun had gone out, the very sun itself, and if she told, her story would be disbelieved only if God was good. If God was in a bad mood, Jessie would be believed... and even if it didn't kill her mother, it would blow the family apart like a stick of dynamite in a rotten pumpkin.”

“Before marrying Vic, she had been a librarian in the Westchester school system, and her own private nightmare had always been telling the kids for the third time—in her loudest speaking voice—to quiet down at once, please. When she did that, they always had—enough for her to get through the period, at least—but what if they wouldn't? That was her nightmare. What if they absolutely wouldn't? What did that leave?”

“I've tried here to delineate some of the differences between science fiction and horror, science fiction and fantasy, terror and horror, horror and revulsion more by example than by definition. All of which is very well, but perhaps we ought to examine the emotion of horror a little more closely--not in terms of definition but in terms of effect. What does horror do? Why do people want to be horrified... why do they pay to be horrified? Why an Exorcist? A Jaws? An Alien? But before we talk about why people crave the effect, maybe we ought to spend a little time thinking about components--and if we do not choose to define horror itself, we can at least examine the elements and perhaps draw some conclusions from them.”

“The sooner Harkness stopped walking, the sooner he could stop walking. That was the simple truth. That was logic. But something went deeper, a truer, more frightening logic. Harkness was a part of the group that Garraty was a part of, a segment of his subclan. Part of a magic circle that Garraty belonged to. And if one part of that circle could be broken, any part of it could be broken.”

“I take a book with me everywhere I go, and find there are all sorts of opportunities to dip in. The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as in long swallows. Waiting rooms were made for books of course! But so are theater lobbies before the show, long and boring checkout lines, and everyones favorite, the john. You can even read while you're driving, thanks to the audiobook revolution.”

“We had accomplished what we could on the small stage of the university; whatever marks we left behind were like "the corpses of angels" in Forché's poem, fleeting and ephemeral impressions on the snowy field of history. We thought we had made a difference, or could. We believed we knew where we were going. Some of us were even right.”

“If I show up at your house ten years from now and find nothing in your living room but The Readers Digest, nothing on your bedroom night table but the newest Dan Brown novel, and nothing in your bathroom but Jokes for the John, I’ll chase you down to the end of your driveway and back, screaming ‘Where are your books? You graduated college ten years ago, so how come there are no damn books in your house? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese?”

“At the end of her life she was aware of heat but not pain. She had time to consider his eyes, eyes of that blue which is the color of the sky at first light of the morning. She had time to think of him on the Drop, riding Rusher flat out with his black hair flying back from his temples and his neckerchief rippling; to see him laughing with an ease and freedom he would never find again in the long life which stretched out for him beyond hers, and it was his laughter she took with her as she went out, fleeing the light and heat in to the silkly, consoling dark, calling to him over and over as she went, calling bird and bear and hare and fish.”