Roland Rat Quotes

You speak of Armageddon,” Callahan said in a low, troubled voice. Roland shook his head, but not in disagreement. “I don’t know that word, Pere, but I’m speaking of great death and great destruction, sure. And somewhere—along the Beam connecting Fish to Rat, perhaps—that has now happened.

With hardly a pause she moved on again, questing. Next it was a small fish . . . then another frog . . . and then a real prize: a water-rat that squeaked and writhed and tried to bite. She crushed the life out of it and stuffed it into her mouth, paws and all. A moment later she bent her head down and regurgitated the waste – a twisted mass of fur and splintered bones. Show him this, then – always assuming that he and Jake get back from whatever adventure they’re on, that is. And say, ‘I know that women are supposed to have strange cravings when they carry a child, Eddie, but doesn’t this seem a little too strange? Look at her, questing through the reeds and ooze like some sort of human alligator. Look at her and tell me she’s doing that in order to feed your child. Any human child.’ Still he would argue. Roland knew it. What he didn’t know was what Susannah herself might do when Roland told her she was growing something that craved raw meat in the middle of the night. And as if this business wasn’t worrisome enough, now there was todash. And strangers who had come looking for them. Yet the strangers were the least of his problems. In fact, he found their presence almost comforting. He didn’t know what they wanted, and yet he did know. He had met them before, many times. At bottom, they always wanted the same thing.

That's bullshit, buddy. And you know it. The trouble was, he DIDN'T know it. He had come face to face with something Susannah had found out for herself after shooting the bear: he could TALK about how he didn't want to be a gunslinger, how he didn't want to be tramping around this crazy world where the three of them seemed to be the only human life, that what he really wanted more than anything else was to be standing on the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street, popping his fingers, munching a chili-dog, and listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival blast out of his Walkman earphones as he watched the girls go by, those ultimately sexy New York girls with their pouty go-to-hell mouths and their long legs in short skirts. He could talk about those things until he was blue in the face, but his heart knew other things. It knew that he had ENJOYED blowing the electronic menagerie back to glory, at least while the game was on and Roland's gun was his own private handheld thunderstorm. He had ENJOYED kicking the robot rat, even though it had hurt his foot and even though he had been scared shitless. In some weird way, that part--the being scared part--actually seemed to add to the enjoyment. All that was bad enough, but his heart knew something even worse: that if a door leading back to New York appeared in front of him right now, he might not walk through it. Not, at least, until he had seen the Dark Tower for himself. He was beginning to believe that Roland's illness was a communicable disease.