Yes I love that part. And then when he refers to it later as that ancient spill of golden light.
Yes I love that part. And then when he refers to it later as that ancient spill of golden light.
And since then that voice of disappointed expectation – that cheated child's voice that can never be satisfied with such a mild superlative as good - has fallen pretty much silent. And except for a few rumbles - like the sounds of those unseen creatures somewhere out in the foggy night - it has been pretty much silent ever since. Maybe you can tell me - why should the silencing of that childish, demanding voice seem so much like dying?
-- Stephen King, Skeleton Crew, The Mist.
Was reminded of these quotes today by my journal app. Here's a few reasons why Roadwork is one of my favorite King novels:
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So we move, and where are we? What are we? Just two strangers sitting in a house that’s sitting in the middle of a lot more strangers’ houses. That’s what we are. The March of Time, Freddy. That’s what it is. Forty waiting for fifty waiting for sixty. Waiting for a nice hospital bed and a nice nurse to stick a nice catheter inside you. Freddy, forty is the end of being young. Well, actually thirty’s the end of being young, forty is where you stop fooling yourself. I don’t want to grow old in a strange place.
###
Mary came in and saw him looking at the TV, his empty scotch-rocks glass in his hand.
"Your dinner's ready, Bart," she said. "You want it in here?
He looked at her, wondering exactly when he had seen the dare-you grin on her lips for the last time...exactly when the little line between her eyes had begun to be there all the time, like a wrinkle, a scar, a tattoo proclaiming age.
You wonder about some things, he thought, that you'd never in God's world want to know. Now why the hell is that?
###
"What were you sbiling about in the living roob, Bart?" Mary asked. Her eyes were red from her cold, and her nose had a chapped, raw look.
"I don't remember," he said, and for the moment he thought: I’ll just scream now, I think. For lost things. For your grin, Mary. Pardon me while I just throw back my head and scream for the grin that's never there on your face anymore. Okay?
“The surf coming in, coming in. Limitless. Clean and deep. We had come here in the summer, Maureen and I, the summer after high school, the summer before college and reality and A6 coming out of Southeast Asia and covering the world like a pall, July, we had eaten pizza and listened to her radio, I had put oil on her back, she had put oil on mine, the air had been hot, the sand bright, the sun like a burning glass.”
— Night Shift, Night Surf, Stephen King
Sometimes it's fun to think about those out there that say "King can't write" (at least a few Folio Society fans who checked out their Shining came to that conclusion).
You can't be aloof until you advertise.
“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
— Stephen King, The Body