Insomnia Stephen King Quotes

It's a long way back to Eden, Sweetheart, so don't sweat the small stuff.

It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in a while exhilarating.

Sometimes you have to be a high-riding bitch to survive. Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto.

Sooner or later everything you thought you'd left behind comes around again. For good or ill, it comes around again.

It's a long walk back to Eden, sweetheart, so don't sweat the small stuff.

Each thing I do I rush through so I can do something else.’ 

They lived in fearful perplexity and passed it off as imagination

Him's name is Roland, Mama. I dream about him, sometimes. Him's a King, too.

perhaps real beauty was something unrecognized by the conscious self, a work that was always in progress, a thing of being rather than seeing.

Worlds which had trembled for a moment in their orbits now steadied, and in one of those worlds, in a desert that was the apotheosis of all deserts, a man named Roland turned over in his bedroll and slept easily once again beneath the alien constellations.

Pack up all my care and woe, blackbird, bye-bye

Don't sweat the small stuff, it's a long walk back to EDEN. Carolyn Roberts

Ralph reflected for a moment on the similarities between loneliness and insomnia — how they were both insidious, cumulative, and divisive, the friends of despair and the enemies of love.

I've become convinced that genius is a vastly overrated commodity. I think this country is full of geniuses, guys and gals so bright they make your average card carrying MENSA member look like Fucko the Clown. And I think that most of them are teachers, living and working in small town obscurity because that's the way they like it.

Hey hey Susan Day have you killed any kids today?

The hardest for man is lie to himself between 3:00 and 6:00 in the morning.

Of all the things which make up our Short-Time lives, sleep is surely the best.

It’s time to quit fucking around, don’t you know that? When you start to see colored footprints on the sidewalk, it’s time to quit fucking around and go to the doctor.

Because ka was like a fish, ka was like a sand dune, ka was like a wheel that didn’t want to stop but only to roll on and on, crushing whatever might happen to be in its path. A wheel of many spokes.

Life’s too short for this shit,’ he had announced to his empty apartment, and that had been the end of the great whiskey experiment.

There’s really no just about it, is there?

What an amazing day this has been, he thought. What a perfectly amazing day . . . and it’s not even one in the afternoon yet.

Envelhecer não é para fracos, pois não?

(...) as afirmações dos cínicos parecem sempre mais plausíveis do que as dos optimistas incorrigíveis.

Murder is blue,

Sleep is the overlooked hero and the poor man’s physician. Shakespeare

How much courage does it take to fire up your tractor and plow under a crop you spent six or seven years growing?' he asked himself. 'How much courage to go on and do that after you’ve spent all that time finding out how to prepare the soil and when to plant and how much to water and when to reap? How much to just say, ‘I have to quit these peas, peas are no good for me, I better try corn or beans.’' ‘A lot,’ he said, wiping at the corners of his eyes again. ‘A damn lot, that’s what I think.

As pessoas estão constantemente a morrer por falta de sono — dizia Wyzer — apesar de o médico legista acabar por escrever 'suicídio', em vez de 'insónia', na linha correspondente à causa da morte.

The ring rolled down the gutter and disappeared into a sewer grate, and there it remained for a long, long time. But not forever. In Derry, things that disappear into the sewer system have a way – an often unpleasant one – of turning up.

and now he knew what it was like to be on the inside, caught in a web woven from your sickest fears and most traumatic experiences. There was no way to retreat from it, and no way to cut through it,

She felt a calmness in him now, a centered lack of fear, that touched her heart with love, and with some queer darkness, as well. He was so different, her son, so special . . . but the world did not love people like that. The world tried to root them out, like tares from a garden.

O sono é o herói esquecido e o curandeiro dos pobres. Shakespeare disse que se trata do fio que remenda os rasgões das preocupações (...).

Right now I'm so in love with you that I feel as if I'm drowning, and the dying's fine.

[‘One life means so much, then?’] Lachesis: [Yes. If the child dies, the Tower of all existence will fall, and the consequences of such a fall are beyond your comprehension. And beyond ours,

Beings too hideous to comprehend, according to Mr. C., and Mr. C. was a gentleman who dealt death for a living.

These four constants are Life, Death, the Purpose and the Random.

Trying to help other people is never stupid.

You couldn’t make people behave, and meddling into their affairs – even with the best of intentions – all too often turned friends into enemies.

We are all bound together by the Purpose,’ Dorrance said abruptly. ‘That’s ka-tet, which means one made of many. The way that many rhymes make up a single poem.

If I’m going to escape, Ralph thought, I’m going to have to do it by running forward so hard and fast I rip right out the other side. The

It’s a long walk back to Eden, sweetheart, so don’t sweat the small stuff.

When things reached a certain degree of wrongness, he was discovering, they could no longer be redeemed or turned around; they just kept going wronger and wronger.

There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the great divisions of the human race.

Old age is an island surrounded by death.

There was one thing about ka they didn’t tell us, he thought. It’s slippery. Slippery as some nasty old fish that won’t come off the hook but just keeps flopping around in your hand.

Surprised, Ralph looked down at the card again. There was a second number there, marked J.W. “Day or night,” Wyzer said. “Really. You won’t disturb my wife; we’ve been divorced since 1983.

I support the right of a woman to have an abortion if she really needs to have one, but the pro-choicers’ holier-than-thou attitude makes me want to puke. They’re the new Puritans, as far as I’m concerned, people who believe that if you don’t think the way they do, you’re going to hell

Something that sounded like an insect droned past Ralph’s ear. He had an idea it was a .45-caliber bug. Better hurry up, sweetheart, Carolyn advised. When bullets hit you on this level they kill you, remember?

Rings and magazines; keychains and umbrellas; hats and glasses; rattles and radios. They looked like different things, but Ralph thought they were really all the same thing: the faint, sorrowing voices of people who had found themselves written out of the script in the middle of the second act while they were still learning their lines for the third, people who had been unceremoniously hauled off before their work was done or their obligations fulfilled, people whose only crime had been to be born in the Random... and to have caught the eye of the madman with the rusty scalpel.

But it’s not about WomanCare, and that’s what drives me absolutely bugfuck. It’s about—’ ‘– abortion.’ ‘Shit, no! Abortion rights are safe in Maine and in Derry, no matter what Susan Day says at the Civic Center Friday night. This is about whose team is the best team. About whose side God’s on. It’s about who’s right.

Except that wasn’t quite what Clotho was thinking of, Ralph discovered. For one flickering moment he seemed to catch an image from the mind of the other, one he found both exciting and disturbing: an enormous tower constructed of dark and sooty stone, standing in a field of red roses. Slit windows twisted up its sides in a brooding spiral.

You son of a bitch fucker! You bastard! Eat my cock! Hurry up! Hurry up and lick shit, you fucking asshole cuntlapper! Fucking booger! Ratdick ringmeat! Suckhole!

There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race. —Iris Murdoch Nuns and Soldiers

All lives are different. All of them matter or none matters.

For Short-Timers there is always a choice. We find that frightening . . . but we also find it beautiful.

Makes me think of a bumper sticker I saw a few years back—SUPPORT MENTAL HEALTH OR I’LL KILL YOU.

It’s a long walk back to Eden, sweetheart.

As a rule, politics wasn’t much of a conversational draw with the Old Crocks, who preferred a good bowel-cancer or stroke any day,

WOMAN NEEDS A MAN LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE.

once stupidity reached a certain level, it became hard to live with.

the friends of despair and the enemies of love

Apparently Ed couldn’t do that, but he did have a little rainy-day cash under the mattress. Either that or he gave the tooth-fairy one hell of a blowjob.

There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.

Quella nave, pensò lo scrittore, si chiamava vecchiaia. Nessuno in particolare desiderava salirvi, ma le cabine erano piene. Anche il pontile d’attracco se per questo.

are like the red and black squares on a checkerboard, defining each other by contrast.

He was actually getting up to find a scrap of paper he could mark the page with when he remembered that Carolyn had been dead for half a year now and burst into tears.

and read the day like a catalogue.

grand fromage.

Three-six-nine, the goose drank wine

A cloying pine-scented deodorizer overlay the smells of shit, piss, and lingering wino-farts like makeup on the face of a corpse.

The sneaker of a little boy named Gage Creed, run down by a speeding tanker-truck on Route 15 in Ludlow.

Most

This was the stuff he had to do, and if the nasty little fuck got in Ralph’s way, one of them was going down. If that didn’t fit in with the big boys’ plans, tough titty.

There’s nothing you can do or say to stop it once he gets to a certain point.

The engine roared into life, accompanied by that clacking sound. It was much louder now. “What’s that?” Lois asked. “I don’t know,” Ralph said, but he thought he did—either a tie-rod or a piston.

Simple decisions—whether to heat up a frozen dinner for his evening meal or grab a sandwich at the Red Apple and go up to the picnic area by Runway 3, for example—had become difficult, almost agonizing.

Even when they’re so small you need a microscope to see em, it’s still murder. Because they’d be kids if you let em alone.’ ‘I guess that just about makes you Adolf Eichmann every time you jerk off,’ Faye said,

The ring rolled down the gutter and disappeared into a sewer grate, and there it remained for a long, long time. But not forever. In Derry, things that disappear into the sewer system have a way—an often unpleasant one—of turning up.

America’s most famous feminist decapitated by a jagged chunk of flying glass. Her head went flying into the sixth row like some strange white bowling ball with a blonde wig pasted on it. They didn’t erupt into panic until the lights went out.

There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race. —Iris Murdoch Nuns and Soldiers Chapter 1 1 About a month after the death of his wife, Ralph Roberts began to suffer from insomnia for the first time in his life.

Two walks; two sightings of the bald doc with the scalpel; two old people suffering insomnia and seeing brightly colored visions; two notes. It’s like Noah leading the animals onto the ark, not one by one but in pairs . . . and is another hard rain going to fall? Well, what do you think, old man?

Each thing I do I rush through so I can do something else. In such a way do the days pass— a blend of stock car racing and the never ending building of a gothic cathedral. Through the windows of my speeding car, I see all that I love falling away: books unread, jokes untold, landscapes unvisited . . .

Ralph found himself remembering times in his life when he’d hit the emotional equivalent of a cold spot while swimming or clear air turbulence while flying. You’d be cruising along through your day, sometimes feeling great, sometimes just feeling okay, but getting along and getting it done . . . and then, for no apparent reason at all, you’d go down in flames and crash. A sense of What the hell’s the use would slide over you – unconnected to any real event in your life at that moment but incredibly powerful all the same – and you felt like simply creeping back to bed and pulling the covers up over your head.

Then something above them opened, revealing darkness shot through with conflicting swirls and rays of color. The wind seemed to blow the Crimson King up toward it, like a leaf in a chimney-flue. The colors began to brighten, and Ralph turned his face away, raising one hand to shield his eyes. He understood that a conduit had opened between the level where he was and the unimaginable levels stacked above it; he also understood that if he looked for long into that brightening glow, those (deadlights) swirling colors, then death would be not the worst thing that could happen to him but the best. He did not just squeeze his eyes shut; he squeezed his mind shut.

I’ve become convinced that genius is a vastly overrated commodity. I think this country is full of geniuses, guys and gals so bright they make your average card-carrying MENSA member look like Fucko the Clown. And I think that most of them are teachers, living and working in small-town obscurity because that’s the way they like it.

Two boys on fluorescent bikes with extravagant ape-hanger handlebars were doing wheelies in the parking lot, weaving in and out of each other’s paths with a dexterity that suggested a solid background in video gaming and possible high-paying futures as air-traffic controllers . . . if they managed to stay away from coke and car accidents, that was.

You can mock, but it’s true,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s not King Herod, though – it’s the Crimson King. Herod was merely one of his incarnations. The Crimson King jumps from body to body and generation to generation like a kid using stepping-stones to cross a brook, Ralph, always looking for the Messiah. He’s always missed him, but this time it could be different. Because Derry’s different. All lines of force have begun to converge here. I know how difficult that is to believe, but it’s true.

Clotho: [At last the change came – the turning of the aura. We knew it would come, but not when it would come. When it did, we went to him and sent him on.] [‘Sent him on to where?’] It was Lois who asked the question, broaching the touchy subject of the afterlife almost by accident. Ralph grabbed for his mental safety belt, almost hoping for one of those peculiar blanks, but when their overlapped answers came, they were perfectly clear. Clotho: [To everywhere.] Lachesis: [To other worlds than these.]

Chuckie Engstrom liked to hide behind the tree in his front yard with a long tree-branch which he called his Peekie Wand. When a woman in a full skirt passed, Chuckie would tiptoe after her, extending the Peekie Wand under the hem and then lifting. Quite often he got to check out the color of the woman’s underwear (the color of ladies’ underwear held great fascination for Chuckie) before she realized what was going on and chased the wildly cackling lad back to his house, threatening to tell his mother.

Life in the years between 1993 and 1998 went on as life in places like Derry always does: the buds of April became the brittle, blowing leaves of October; Christmas trees were brought into homes in mid-December and hauled off in the backs of Dumpsters with strands of tinsel still hanging sadly from their boughs during the first week of January; babies came in through the in door and old folks went out through the out door. Sometimes people in the prime of their lives went out through the out door, too. In Derry there were five years of haircuts and permanents, storms and senior proms, coffee and cigarettes, steak dinners at Parker's Cove and hotdogs at the Little League field. Girls and boys fell in love, drunks fell out of cars, short skirts fell out of favor. People reshingled their roofs and repaved their driveways. Old bums were voted out of office; new bums were voted in. It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in awhile exhilarating. The fundamental things continued to apply as time went by.

Clotho: [Be content with this: beyond the Short-Time levels of existence and the Long-Time levels on which Lachesis, Atropos, and I exist, there are yet other levels. These are inhabited by creatures we could call All-Timers, beings which are either eternal or so close to it as to make no difference. Short-Timers and Long-Timers live in overlapping spheres of existence – on connected floors of the same building, if you like – ruled by the Random and the Purpose. Above these floors, inaccessible to us but very much a part of the same tower of existence, live other beings. Some of them are marvellous and wonderful; others are hideous beyond our ability to comprehend, let alone yours. These beings might be called the Higher Purpose and the Higher Random . . . or perhaps there is no Random beyond a certain level; we suspect that may be the case, but we have no real way of telling. We do know that it is something from one of these higher levels that has interested itself in Ed, and that something else from up there made a countermove. That countermove is you, Ralph and Lois.]

The ring rolled down the gutter and disappeared into a sewer grate, and there it remained for a long, long time. But not forever. In Derry, things that disappear into the sewer system have a way - an often unpleasant one - of turning up.

Getting old is certainly no job for sissies, is it?

because love doesn’t come out of a faucet you can turn on and off whenever you want to’—but that I had to remember my love couldn’t fix him, that not even Ed’s love for Natalie could

...at some point soon... he's going to die without any idea that he ever lived.

Clotho: [Atropos is what happened to Rosalie. Ralph’s friend Joe Wyzer was only what we call “fulfilling circumstance.”]