Stephen King Quotes

When I close my eyes, I still see things no one should ever experience: a bright red light, the black cloud soon after, people running in every direction trying desperately to escape - I remember it all.

When we're afraid we shoot. But when we're nostalgic we take pictures.

All my life, to this day, the memory of my childhood remains grim and incoherent. If I close my eyes and think back, I see little except violence and fear. In those early years, I somehow came to understand I would have to draw from within myself whatever emotional resources I needed to go wherever I was headed. As a result, for years, I became a boy who lived almost totally within himself.

From my childhood, I remember a tiny old woman named Mary, made pale and almost translucent by time. Mary's childhood memories extended back to the confusing and violent finale of the Civil War, and she told stories of brutal murders in those days and refused to name some of the killers, as if dead men might still be prosecuted in the late 1950s.

The young woman who brought me acquainted with Captain Murderer had a fiendish enjoyment of my terrors, and used to begin, I remember - as a sort of introductory overture - by clawing the air with both hands, and uttering a long low hollow groan. So acutely did I suffer from this ceremony in combination with this infernal Captain, that I sometimes used to plead I thought I was hardly strong enough and old enough to hear the story again just yet.

My head was spinning, I had never seen blood. Four years old, this don't feel like love.

Why should I be afraid now? Strange men have come to kill me ever since I was twelve years old.

She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again. Edna heard her father's voice and her sister Margaret's. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air. (last lines)

We remember childhood as the fabulous years of our lives, and nations remember their childhood as fabulous years.

These happy golden years are passing by, these happy golden years.

Tragedy, as you know, is always a fait accompli, whereas terror always has to do with anticipation, with man's recognition of hisown negative potential--with his sense of what he is capable of.

Terrorism is obviously on everybody's mind. The other day my son says to me, 'Daddy, how come the bad men hate us?' How sad is that? I actually got tears in my eyes - because he's 18. What kind of a moron am I raising?

Why is my needle stuck in childhood? I don't know why. I guess it's because that's where my heart is.

He was the boy that made mix tapes with themes and hand-colored covers until the day he hit my sister and stopped crying.

Music is a wind that blows away the years, memories, and fear, that crouching animal I carry inside me.

What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.

In a healthy individual, a broken bone that has healed properly is strongest where it was once broken. You have not lost any life, Henry told himself. You will still get your fair share of years. Yet the quality of his life changed. Once you've been struck by violence, you acquire companions that never leave you entirely: Suspicion, Fear, Anxiety, Despair, Joylessness. The natural smile is taken from you and the natural pleasures you once enjoyed lose their appeal.

there was a time when these weren't memories.

Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still, tea-colored puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colored minds.

For fear, real fear such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.

A surfeiting of terror soon made terror a cliché.

Memory's so treacherous. One moment you're lost in a carnival of delights with poignant childhood aromas, the flashing neon on puberty, all that sentimental candyfloss. The next, it leads you somewhere you don't want to go.. Somewhere dark and cold, filled with the damp ambiguous shapes of things you'd hoped were forgotten.

Five years later I still wake up screaming for him to run

What I remember the most about my childhood is constant fear and "good food." I don't want to get into the greasy, buttery, deep-fried, fatty, sugary, meaty, barbecued details here, but with no knowledge of healthy lifestyles or positive psychology, time took its toll on me.

Asking about acting to me is like asking about junior high.