Stephen King

No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just... come out the other side.

A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God's creatures, and one without must be among the most miserable, I think, the only true blessing of their lives that they don't know how poorly off they are.

He thought that fat boys were probably only allowed to love pretty girls inside. If he told anyone how he felt (not that he had anyone to tell), that person would probably laugh until he had a heart-attack.

Driving a desk was sometimes lonely, but Eddie had been in the drivers'-seat himself more than once, his aspirator riding there with him on the dashboard, its trigger reflected ghostly in the windshield (and a bucket-load of pills in the glove compartment), and he knew that real loneliness was a smeary red: the color of the taillights of the car ahead of you reflected on wet hottop in a driving rain.

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.

Lying in the bed that had once held two, Lisey thought alone never felt more lonely than when you woke up and discovered you still had the house to yourself. That you and the mice in the walls were the only ones still breathing.

Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.

His head .. it exploded. As if someone had scooped out his brains and put a hand grenade in his skull.

They were with him, and for that little while the darkness was kind.

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.

Jake guessed Henry had been pulling shit like this on him so long that Eddie only noticed it when Henry pulled it on someone else _ someone like the blonde ticket-seller.

The narrator, a time traveler from 2011, scoffs at the despondency caused by the Cuban Missile Crisis -- especially the drug and alcohol use of a resident of 1962 he supposedly cares about. Then he finds his compassion because he remembers he is the exception in being able to see beyond the immediate -- and foreboding -- horizon.

As Wendy watched them they burst into a chord of tinkling, girlish laughter. She felt a smile touch her own lips; not one of them could be under sixty.

Seven, Richie thought. That's the magic number. There has to be seven of us. That's the way it's supposed to be.

Some things you never forgot. She had come to believe that the very things the practical world dismissed as ephemera__hings like songs and moonlight and kisses__ere sometimes the things that lasted the longest. They might be foolish, but they defied forgetting. And that was good. That was good.

It was as if the body disdained memory... or refused the responsibility of it.

At such times one sees everything and remembers it all. I know from personal experience. I wish I did not.

Start with a blank surface. It doesn't have to be paper or canvas, but I feel it should be white. We call it white because we need a word, but its true name is nothing. Black is the absence of light, but white is the absence of memory, the color of can't remember.