Well Said!

This used to be a blog dedicated to my graduate studies. Now I see that the answers do not lie in perpetual higher education, but there is still plenty of wisdom to be had in the words of others.

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

It Stands to Reason

All of the following quotations taken from the World Book Night U.S. free edition of The Stand by Stephen King


"...people who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad."  -- Judge Farris, p. 1008

"You stare at your face in the mirror.  You stare at it for a long time. Five minutes, ten, fifteen. No fair blinking.  You watch with an intellectual sort of horror as your face changes, like the face of Lon Chaney, Jr., in a werewolf epic. You become a stranger to yourself, an olive-skinned Doppelganger, a psychotic Vampira with pale skin and fish-lit eyes."  --  One of Nadine's metaphors that almost describes the presence of the dark man, p. 1088

"They talk like people, [Glen Bateman] thought, who have kept the huddled-up secrets of their guilts and inadequacies to themselves for a long time, only to discover that these things, when verbalized, were only life-sized after all.  When the inner terror sowed in sleep was finally harvested in this marathon public discussion, the terror became more manageable...perhaps even conquerable." -- p. 1134

"You are to go west," Mother Abigail whispered.  "You are to take no food, no water.  You are to go this very day, and in the clothes you stand up in.  You are to go on foot.  I am in the way of knowing that one of you will not reach your destination, but I don't know which will be the one to fall.  I am in the way of knowing that the rest will be taken before this man Flagg, who is not a man at all but a supernatural being. I don't know if it's God's will for you to defeat him.  I don't know if it's God's will for you to ever see Boulder again.  Those things are not for me to see.  But he is in Las Vegas, and you must go there, and it is there that you will make your stand.  You will go, and you will not falter, because you will have the Everlasting Arm of the Lord God of Hosts to lean on. Yes. With God's help you will stand."  -- p. 1144

"Watching the words grow, letter by letter.  Watching the sentences grow, word by word. Watching the paragraphs grow, each one a brick in the great walled bulwark that was language.... The bricks of language. A stone, a leaf, an unfound door.  Words. Worlds. Magic. Life and immortality. Power....  Watching the letters improve as time passed.  Watching them connect with each other, printing left behind, writing now. Assembling thoughts and plots. That was the whole world, after all, nothing but thoughts and plots.  [Harold Lauder] had gotten a typewriter finally....  The typewriter unlocked the rest of it for him.  At first it was slow, so slow, and the constant typos were frustrating beyond belief.  It was as if the machine was actively -- but slyly -- opposing his will. But when he got better at it, he began to understand what the machine really was -- a kind of magic conduit between his brain and the blank page he strove to conquer." -- p. 1211

     "[Tom Cullen] stepped out into the courtyard of building without a backward glance.  The moon was so bright that he cast a shadow on the cracked cement where the would-be high rollers had once parked their cars with the out-of-state plates.
     "He looked up at the ghostly coin that floated in the sky.
     "M-O-O-N, that spells moon," he whispered.  "Laws, yes.  Tom Cullen knows what that means."
                                                                                                            -- p. 1244

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