Salem's Lot Quotes

God grant me to SERENITY to accept what I cannot change the TENACITY to change what I may and the GOOD LUCK not to f*** up too often

But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.

The basis of all human fears, he thought. A closed door, slightly ajar.

The town kept its secrets, and the Marsten House brooded over it like a ruined king.

If a fear cannot be articulated, it can’t be conquered.

Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us.

The sandwich he made was bologna and cheese, his favorite. All the sandwiches he made were his favorites; that was one of the advantages of being single.

Crying was like pissing everything out on the ground.

The town has a sense, not of history, but of time, and the telephone poles seem to know this. If you lay your hand against one, you can feel the vibration from the wires deep within the wood, as if souls had been imprisoned in there and were struggling to get out.

At three in the morning the blood runs slow and thick, and slumber is heavy. The soul either sleeps in blessed ignorance of such an hour or gazes about itself in utter despair. There is no middle ground.

Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration.

If a man dethrones God in his heart, Satan must ascend to His position.

small towns have long memories and pass their horrors down ceremonially from generation to generation.

Ben smiled back, 'Mark Twain said a novel was a confession to everything by a man who had never done anything.

The essential and defining characteristic of childhood is not the effortless merging of dream and reality, but only alienation. There are no words for childhood's dark turns and exhalations. A wise child recognizes it and submits to the necessary consequences. A child who counts the cost is a child no longer.

To his way of thinking, the only thing more natural than death was sex.

And all around them, the bestiality of the night rises on tenebrous wings. The vampire’s time has come.

Corey Bryant sank into a great forgetful river, and that river was time, and its waters were red.

The town knew about darkness. It knew about the darkness that comes on the land when rotation hides the land from the sun, and about the darkness of the human soul

There were fourteen steps exactly fourteen. But the top one was smaller, out of proportion, as if it had been added to avoid the evil number.

There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.

That above all else. They did not look out their windows. No matter what noises or dreadful possibilities, no matter how awful the unknown, there was an even worse thing: to look the Gorgon in the face.

I think it's relatively easy for people to accept something like telepathy or precognition or teleplasm because their willingness to believe doesn't cost them anything. It doesn't keep them awake nights. But the idea that the evil that men do lives after them is unsettling.

Things were going very fast now. Too fast to suit him. Fantasy and reality had merged.

The town cares for devil’s work no more than it cares for God’s or man’s. It knew darkness. And darkness was enough.

She had always consciously or unconsciously formed fear into a simple equation: fears = unknown.

But when fall comes, kicking summer out on it's treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed.

We’d all be scared if we knew what was swept under the carpet of each other’s minds

Writing controlled fiction is called “plotting.” Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however…that is called “storytelling.” Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration.

It was a moment he remembered for years after, as though a special small slice had been cut from the cake of time. If nothing fires between two people, such an instant simply falls back into the general wrack of memory.

God grant me the SERENITY to accept what I cannot change, the TENACITY to change what I may, and the GOOD LUCK not to fuck up too often.

She said there are evil men in the world, truly evil men. Sometimes we hear of them, but more often they work in absolute darkness.

Oddly, the burned hand didn't seem to hurt much anymore; it was only numb. It would have been better if there had been pain. Pain was at least real.

People believe a lot of weird stuff in Salem.

Alone. Yes, that’s the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn’t hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym…

a cloud-congested caul that is alternately red, orange, vermilion, purple. Sometimes the clouds break apart in great, slow rafts, letting through beams of innocent yellow sunlight that are bitterly nostalgic for the summer that has gone by.

If you haven't considered it already, consider it now: there is every possibility that some of us, or all of us, may live and triumph, only to stand trial for murder.

There may be some truth in that idea houses absorb the emotions that are spent in them

At three in the morning the blood runs slow and thick, and slumber is heavy. The soul either sleeps in blessed ignorance of such an hour or gazes about itself in utter despair. There is no middle ground

Before drifting away entirely, he found himself reflecting---not for the first time---on the peculiarity of adults. Thet took laxatives, liquor, or sleeping pills to drive away their terrors so that sleep would come, and their terrors were so tame and domestic: the job, the money, what the teacher will think if I can't get Jennie nicer clothes, does my wife still love me, who are my friends. They were pallid compared to the fears every child lies cheek and jowl with in his dark bed, with no one to confess to in hope of perfect understanding but another child. There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.

It had that comfortably sprung, lived-in look that library books with a lively circulation always get; bent page corners, a dab of mustard on page 331, a whiff of some reader's spilled after-dinner whiskey on page 468. Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us, how good stories abide, unchanged and mutely wise, while we poor humans grow older and slower.

A veces los locos pueden imitar increíblemente bien la cordura.

The best-educated doctor in the world is standing on a low island in the middle of a sea of ignorance.

If a fear cannot be articulated, it can’t be conquered. And the fears locked in small brains are much too large to pass through the orifice of the mouth.

There is no life here but the slow death of days, and so when the evil falls on the town, its coming seems almost preordained, sweet and morphic. It is almost as though the town knows the evil was coming and the shape it would take.

Thin clouds form, and the shadows lengthen out. They have no breadth, as summer shadows have; there are no leaves on the trees or fat clouds in the sky to make them thick. They are gaunt, mean shadows that bite the ground like teeth. As the sun nears the horizon, its benevolent yellow begins to deepen, to become infected, until it glares an angry inflamed orange. It throws a variegated glow over the horizon.

Talk did no good with bullies. Hurting was the only language that the bullies of the world seemed to understand, and he supposed that was why the world always had such a hard time getting along.

His love for his wife and son was not beautiful—no one would ever write a poem to the passion of a man who balled his socks before his wife—but it was sturdy and unswerving.

It proves little, except that perhaps in America even a pig can aspire to immortality.

There are no atheists in the foxholes, I’ve been told, and precious few agnostics in the Intensive Care ward.

Salem’s Lot,” he read. “A novel by Stephen King.” He looked up at Eddie, then at Jake. “Heard of him? Either of you? He’s not from my time, I don’t think.

You have forgotten the doctrine of your own church, is it not so? The cross…the bread and wine…the confessional…only symbols. Without faith, the cross is only wood, the bread baked wheat, the wine sour grapes.

At three in the morning the gaudy paint is off that old whore, the world, and she has no nose and a glass eye. Gaiety becomes hollow and brittle, as in Poe's castle surrounded by the Red Death. Horror is destroyed by boredom. Love is a dream.

On Salem's Lot: " My favorite vampire story ever. I first read this 20 years ago, and I can still quote lines from it. "You have been ill-used, Mr Bryant." "I will see you sleep like the dead, teacher." "The boy makes ten of you, false priest." Fuck twilight. Seriously...

The country is an amazing paradox. In other lands, when a man eats to his fullest day after day, that man becomes fat…sleepy…piggish. But in this land…it seems the more you have the more aggressive you become.

but small towns have long memories and pass their horrors down ceremonially from generation to generation.

The sun loses it's thin grip on the air first, turning it cold, making it remember that winter is coming and winter will be long.

There’s little good in sedentary small towns. Mostly indifference spiced with an occasional vapid evil – or worse, a conscious one.

Perhaps it wasn’t all Freud after all. Perhaps a large part of it had to do with the invention of the electric light, which had killed the shadows in men’s minds much more effectively than a stake through a vampire’s heart—and less messily, too.

I think it’s relatively easy for people to accept something like telepathy or precognition or teleplasm because their willingness to believe doesn’t cost them anything. It doesn’t keep them awake nights. But the idea that the evil that men do lives after them is more unsettling.

His fingers were permanently yellowed with chalk dust rather than nicotine, but it was still the residue of an addicting substance.

I was just following orders. The people elected me. But who elected the people?

New Jersey. If there’s anyone more purely foolish than a New Yorker, it’s a fellow from New Jersey.

Dark, don't catch me here.

If it’s all true, then we’re in the citadel of unbelief, where nightmares are dispatched with Lysol and scalpels and chemotherapy rather than with stakes and Bibles and wild mountain thyme.

Los Zapatos, which means "the shoes" ... was a small village not far from the ocean. It was fairly free of tourists. There was no good road, no ocean view ... and no historical points of interest. Also, the local cantina was infested with cockroaches and the only whore was a fifty-year-old grandmother.

So turn off the television—in fact, why don’t you turn off all the lights except for the one over your favorite chair?—and we’ll talk about vampires here in the dim. I think I can make you believe in them, because while I was working on this book, I believed in them myself.

The church is more than a bundle of ideals, as these younger fellows seem to believe. It’s more than a spiritual Boy Scout troop. The church is a Force … and one does not set a Force in motion lightly.

It conjured up an image of fate, not blind at all but equipped with sentient 20/20 vision and intent on grinding helpless mortals between the great millstones of the universe to make some unknown bread.

In the modern world all terrors could be gutted by simple use of the transitive axiom of quality. Some fears were justified, of course (you don't drive when you're too plowed to see, don't extend the hand of friendship to snarling dogs, don't go parking with boys you don't know - how did the old joke go? Screw or walk?), but until now she had not believed that some fears were larger than comprehension, apocalyptic and nearly paralyzing. This equation was insoluble. The act of moving forward at all became heroism.

Si entre dos personas no se produce nada especial, un instante como ése se pierde en el naufragio general de la memoria.

Sour cream! He had tasted it once and liked to puke.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

And so the argument was begun, progressing more in the silences than in the speeches, like a chess game played by mail.

The nights are his, but in the daytime you will hound him and hound him until he takes fright and flees or until you drag him, staked and screaming, into the sunlight!

Lovecraft was an atheist. Edgar Allan Poe was sort of a half-assed transcendentalist. And Hawthorne was only conventionally religious.

As the stranger came closer, Dud understood everything and welcomed it, and when the pain came, it was as sweet as silver, as green as still water at dark fathoms.

The sun loses its thin grip on the air first, turning it cold, making it remember that winter is coming and winter will be long. Thin clouds form, and the shadows lengthen out. They have no breadth, as summer shadows have; there are no leaves on the trees or fat clouds in the sky to make them thick. They are gaunt, mean shadows that bite the ground like teeth.

Do you know what made Poe great? And Machen and Lovecraft? A direct pipeline to the old subconscious. To the fears and twisted needs that swim around down there like phosphorescent fish.

Част от нашето неразбиране се дължи на факта, че всъщност не знаем какво представлява мозъкът. И най-образованият лекар стои върху ниско островче сред море от невежество. Ние(има предвид лекарите) сме като шамани - размахваме магически жезли, колим пилета и гадаем по кръвта им. И най-удивителното е, че твърде често помагаме на хората.

At moments like this he suspected that Hitler had been nothing but a harried bureaucrat and Satan himself a mental defective with a rudimentary sense of humor—the kind that finds feeding firecrackers wrapped in bread to seagulls unutterably funny.

He brought the hammer down on the stake once more, and the blood that pulsed from Barlow's chest turned black. Then, dissolution. It came in the space of two seconds, too fast to ever be believed in the daylight of later years, yet slow enough to recur again and again in nightmares, with awful stopmotion slowness.

Fears locked in small brains are much too large to pass through the orifice of the mouth.

Heaven was a dim attraction compared to that of fighting—and perhaps perishing—in the service of the Lord.

Oscuridad, no me alcances aquí.

In the Lot the dark held hard.

There is no life here but the slow death of days, and so when the evil falls on the town, its coming seems almost preordained, sweet and morphic.

Question: If you put a psychologist in a room with a man who thinks he’s Napoleon and leave them there for a year (or ten or twenty), will you end up with two Skinner men or two guys with their hands in their shirts? Answer: Insufficient data.

And if there are no cars or planes, and if no one's Uncle John is out in the wood lot west of town banging away at a quail or pheasant; if the only sound is the slow beat of your own heart, you can hear another sound, and that is the sound of life winding down to its cyclic close, waiting for the first winter snow to perform last rites.

Here is a fish swimming around comfortably and (he thinks) unobtrusively, flicking here and there amongst the kelp and the plankton. Draw away for the long view and there’s the kicker: It’s a goldfish bowl.

The great social, moral, and spiritual battles of the ages boiled down to Sandy McDougall slamming her snot-nosed kid in the corner and the kid would grow up and slam his own kid in the corner, world without end, hallelujah, chunky peanut butter. Hail Mary, full of grace, help me win this stock-car race.

The town knew about darkness. It knew about the darkness that comes on the land when rotation hides the land from the sun, and about the darkness of the human soul. The town is an accumulation of three parts which, in sum, are greater than the sections. The town is the people who live there, the buildings which they have erected to den or do business in, and it is the land.

Hank Peters woke up in the early hours of the next morning from a dream of huge rats crawling out of an open grave, a grave which held the green and rotting body of Hubie Marsten, with a frayed length of manila hemp around his neck. Peters lay propped on his elbows, breathing heavily, naked torso slicked with sweat, and when his wife touched his arm he screamed aloud. EIGHT

When you come from the city to the town you lie wakeful in the absence of noise at first. You wait for something to break it: the cough of shattering glass, the squeal of tires blistering against the pavement, perhaps a scream. But there is nothing but the unearthly hum of the telephone wires and so you wait and wait and then sleep badly. But when the town gets you, you sleep like the town and the town sleeps deep in its blood, like a bear.

He did it now, holding it up before his eyes as he had as a boy, and it did its old, old trick. Through the floating snow you could see a little gingerbread house with a path leading up to it. The gingerbread shutters were closed, but as an imaginative boy you could fancy that one of the shutters was being folded back (as indeed, one of them seemed to be folding back now) by a long white hand, and then a pallid face would be looking out at you, grinning with long teeth, inviting you into this house beyond the world in its slow and endless fantasy-land of false snow, where time was a myth. The face was looking out at him now, pallid and hungry, a face that would never look on daylight or blue skies again. It was his own face. He threw the paperweight into the corner and it shattered. He left without waiting to see what might leak out of it.

Callahan found that the common first reaction to news of cancer, strokes, heart attacks, or the failure of some major organ was one of betrayal. The patient was astounded to find that such a close (and, up to now at least, fully understood) friend as one’s own body could be so sluggard as to lie down on the job. The reaction which followed close on the heels of the first was the thought that a friend who would let one down so cruelly was not worth having. The conclusion that followed these reactions was that it didn’t matter if this friend was worth having or not. One could not refuse to speak to one’s traitorous body, or get up a petition against it, or pretend that one was not at home when it called. The final thought in this hospital-bed train of reasoning was the hideous possibility that one’s body might not be a friend at all, but an enemy implacably dedicated to destroying the superior force that had used it and abused it ever since the disease of reason set in.

But then, not long after, in another article, Loftus writes, "We live in a strange and precarious time that resembles at its heart the hysteria and superstitious fervor of the witch trials." She took rifle lessons and to this day keeps the firing instruction sheets and targets posted above her desk. In 1996, when Psychology Today interviewed her, she burst into tears twice within the first twenty minutes, labile, lubricated, theatrical, still whip smart, talking about the blurry boundaries between fact and fiction while she herself lived in another blurry boundary, between conviction and compulsion, passion and hyperbole. "The witch hunts," she said, but the analogy is wrong, and provides us with perhaps a more accurate window into Loftus's stretched psyche than into our own times, for the witch hunts were predicated on utter nonsense, and the abuse scandals were predicated on something all too real, which Loftus seemed to forget: Women are abused. Memories do matter. Talking to her, feeling her high-flying energy the zeal that burns up the center of her life, you have to wonder, why. You are forced to ask the very kind of question Loftus most abhors: did something bad happen to her? For she herself seems driven by dissociated demons, and so I ask. What happened to you? Turns out, a lot. (refers to Dr. Elizabeth F. Loftus)

Antes de abandonarse por completo, Mark se dio cuenta de que estaba pensando, y no por primera vez, lo extraño que eran los adultos. Tomaban laxantes, alcohol o píldoras para dormir, para ahuyentar sus terrores y conseguir conciliar el sueño, y sus temores eran tan mansos, tan domésticos: el trabajo, el dinero, lo que pensará la maestra si Jennie no va a la escuela mejor vestida, si me amará mi mujer, quiénes serán mis amigos. Pálidos miedos comparados con los que experimentan todos los niños en la oscuridad de sus lechos, sin poder confesárselos a nadie en la esperanza de ser comprendido, a no ser a otro niño. No hay terapia de grupo ni psiquiatría ni servicios sociales de la comunidad para el niño que debe hacer frente a eso que todas las noches está en el sótano o debajo de la cama, a eso que acecha, se mueve y amenaza detrás del punto donde la visión se acaba. Y noche tras noche hay que librar la misma batalla solitaria, y la única cura es que al final las facultades imaginativas terminan por anquilosarse, y a eso se le llama ser adulto.

But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you. It stays on through October and, in rare years, on into November. Day after day the skies are a clear, hard blue, and the clouds that float across them, always west to east, are calm white ships with gray keels. The wind begins to blow by the day, and it is never still. It hurries you along as you walk the roads, crunching the leaves that have fallen in mad and variegated drifts. The wind makes you ache in some place that is deeper than your bones. It may be that it touches something old in the human soul, a chord of race memory that says Migrate or die – migrate or die. Even in your house, behind square walls, the wind beats against the wood and the glass and sends its fleshless pucker against the eaves and sooner or later you have to put down what you were doing and go out and see. And you can stand on your stoop or in your dooryard at mid-afternoon and watch the cloud shadows rush across Griffen’s pasture and up Schoolyard Hill, light and dark, light and dark, like the shutters of the gods being opened and closed. You can see the goldenrod, that most tenacious and pernicious and beauteous of all New England flora, bowing away from the wind like a great and silent congregation. And if there are no cars or planes, and if no one’s Uncle John is out in the wood lot west of town banging away at a quail or pheasant; if the only sound is the slow beat of your own heart, you can hear another sound, and that is the sound of life winding down to its cyclic close, waiting for the first winter snow to perform last rites.

These social media shamings bear an uncanny resemblance to medieval witch hunts.” If you were accused of being a witch back then, you were shit out of luck. Being accused was all it took. Forget “innocent until proven guilty.” Nobody bothered to prove your guilt. Nobody dared to speak up on your behalf, for fear of being called a witch sympathizer. Because if you were seen as the friend of a witch, you were the next one to be accused of being a witch. As soon as a woman was accused of being a witch, she was a pariah without any friends. Nobody wanted to be seen in public with her. The whole village ganged up on her. Everyone was trying to outdo everyone else in their antiwitch fervor: “Look at me! I'm throwing rocks at the witch! Look at how much I hate witches! I am definitely NOT a witch myself!” Whenever I see a social media mob ganging up on a celebrity for supposedly saying something “offensive” it reminds me of the Salem witch hysteria: “That's racist! And me calling you a racist proves that I'm definitely not a racist myself! That's sexist! I shame you! And that means I'm definitely not sexist myself! I shame you for being a bad person. That means I'm a good person! Look at how really really offended I am! That means I'm a really really good person!” According to the bible, Jesus said "let he who is without sin throw the first rock." But a lot of people seem to think he said: "If you throw rocks at someone else, it proves that you're without sin.