Do You Love?

Skeleton Crew

For Owen
"Or how I steal your face--
steal it, steal it, and wear it for my own.
It wears out fast on my face. "

Survivor Type
You get to know people, you listen, you make connections. You have to, when you're hustling the street. Any asshole knows how to die. The thing to learn is how to survive, you know what I mean?

Screw you, Jack, I got mine. The Second Oath of Hippocrates or Hypocrites.

Introduction (On writing)
You don't do it for money; you do it because it saves you from feeling bad. A man or woman able to turn his or her back on something like that is just a monkey, that's all.

The Mist
"You always make it seem better," she said, and that made me feel good. (p35)

To the champ, everything is serious business. I'm hoping that he'll live long enough to learn that in this world that is a very dangerous attitude. (p38)

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. (p112)

They stared at you with blank and shiny doorknob eyes. The hard cement of reality had come apart in some unimaginable earthquake, and those poor devils had fallen through. In time, some of them might come back. If there was time. (p112)

I realized with fresh horror that new doors of perception were opening up inside. New? Not so. Old doors perception. The perception of a child who has not yet learned to protect itself by developing the tunnel vision that keeps out ninety percent of the Universe. Children see everything their eyes happen upon, hear everything in their ears' range. But if life is the rise of consciousness, then it is also the reduction of input. (p116)

Terror is the widening of perspective and perception. The horror was in knowing I was swimming down to a place most of us leave when we get out of diapers and into training pants....When rationality begins to break down, the circuits of the human brain can overload. Axons grow bright and feverish. Hallucinations turn real:the quicksilver puddle at the point where perspective makes parallel lines seem to to intersect is really there; the dead walk and talk; a rose begins to sing. (p117)

There are things of such darkness and horror--just I suppose, as there are things of such great beauty--that they will not fit through the puny human doors of perception. (p151)

Cain Rose Up
You either ate the world or the world are you and it was okay either way. [Either way something got ATE UP]. (p201)

"God got mad at Cain because Cain had an idea God was a vegetarian. His brother knew better. God made the world in His image, and if you don't eat the world, the world eats you. So Cain says to his brother, 'Why didn't you tell me?' And his brother says, 'Why didn't you listen?' And Cain says, 'Okay, I'm listening now.' So he waxes his brother and says, 'Hey God! You want meat? Here it is! You want roast or ribs or Abelburgers or what?' And God told him to put on his boogie shoes. So...what do you think?" (p204)

Mrs. Todd's Shortcut
"That was the best kiss I ever had in my whole life. It was just on the cheek, and it was the chaste kiss of a married woman, but it was ripe as a peach, or like those flowers that open in the dark, and when her lips touched my skin I felt like...I don't know exactly what I felt like, because a man can't easily hold on to those things that happened to him with a girl who was ripe when the world was young or how those things felt--I'm talking around what I mean, but I think you understand. Those things all get a red cast to them in your memory and you cannot see through it." (p223)

There is Holes in the middle. Do you know that?

The Jaunt
It's eternity in there.

It [teleportation] seems to revolve around the idea of consciousness, and the fact that consciousness doesn't particulate--it remains whole and constant. It also retains some screwy sense of time. But we don't know how pure consciousness would measure time, or even if that concept has any meaning to pure mind. We can't even conceive what pure mind be. (p255)

Your mind can be your best friend; it can keep you amused even when there's nothing to read, nothing to do. But it can turn on you when it's left with no input for too long. It can turn on you, which means that it turns on itself, savages itself, perhaps consumes itself in an unthinkable act of auto-cannibalism. How long in there, in terms of years? 0.000000000067 seconds for the body to Jaunt, but how long for the unparticulated consciousness? A hundred years? A thousand? A million? A billion? How long alone with your thoughts in an endless field of white? And then, when a billion eternities have passed, the crashing return of light and form and body. Who wouldn't go insane? (P255)

Longer than you think, Dad.

The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands
IT IS THE TALE, NOT HE WHO TELLS IT.

Beachworld
--a hollow sighing of the wind, not in his ear but in the canyon between right brain and left brain--he heard that sighing somewhere in the blackness which is spanned only by the suspension bridge of the corpus callosum, which connects conscious thought to the infinite. He felt no hunger, no thirst, no heat, no fear. He heard only the voice in the emptiness.
And a ship came. (p355)

Nona
In the first semester of my sophomore year I fell in Love. It was the biggest thing that had ever happened to me. Pretty? She would have knocked you back two steps. To this day I have no idea what she saw in me. I don't even know if she loved me or not. I think she did at first. After that I was just a habit that's hard to break, like smoking or driving with your elbow poked out the window. She held me for a while, maybe not wanting to break the habit. Maybe she held me for wonder, or maybe it was just her vanity. Good boy, roll over, sit up, fetch the paper. Here's a kiss good night. It doesn't matter. For a while it was Love, then it was like Love, then it was Over.  (p384)
...
I started being afraid of girls, a little. And it wasn't so much the ones I was impotent with as the ones I wasn't, the ones I could make it with. They made me uneasy. I kept asking myself where they were hiding whatever axes they liked to grind and when they were going to let me have it. I'm not so strange at that. You show me a married man or a man with a steady woman, and I'll show you someone who is asking himself, What is she doing when I'm not around? What does she really think of me? And maybe most of all, How much of me has she got? How much is left? Once I started thinking about those things, I thought about them all the time. (p385)

I'm not crazy. I know that and trust that you do, too. If you say you aren't  crazy that's supposed to mean you are, but I am beyond all those little games. She was with me, she was real. I love her. True love will never die. That's how I signed all my letters to Betsy, the ones I tore up.
Do you love?
Yes, I love.
And true love will never die.

The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet
But, luckily for us, all our unfortunate problems have the same short-term solution, and so I strain my arms and my tiny body to give it to you, my drunken friend. YOU may wonder about long-term solutions; I assure you there are none. All wounds are mortal. Take what's given. You sometimes get a little slack in the rope but the rope always has an end. So what. Bless the slack and don't waste breath cursing the drop. A grateful heart knows that in the end we all swing.

The Reach
She remembered Bill telling her once that when you were lost in the woods, you had to pretend that the leg which was on the same side of your body as your smart hand was lame.

"These are things made for thinking on slowly. Things to be thought on at length, while the hands do their work and coffee sits in a solid china mug nearby. They are questions of Reach, maybe: do the dead sing? And do they love the living?"

Do the dead sing? Do they love?


All words above attributed to Stephen King

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Oh God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"
Abe says, "Man, you must be puttin' me on"
God say, "No." Abe say, "What?"
God say, "You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin' you better run"
Well Abe says, "Where do you want this killin' done?"
God says, "Out on Highway 61."