Wolves Of The Calla Quotes

It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.

No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves.

I wanted to say goodbye to someone, and have someone say goodbye to me. The goodbyes we speak and the goodbyes we hear are the goodbyes that tell us we´re still alive.

Your man Jesus seems to me a bit of a son of a bitch when it comes to women,´Roland said. ´Was He ever married?´ The corners of Callahan's mouth quirked. ´No´ he said, ´but His girlfriend was a whore.´ ´Well,´ Roland said, ´that's a start.´

If,' Roland said. 'An old teacher of mine used to call it the only word a thousand letters long.

Mister, we deal in lead.

The goodbyes we speak and the goodbyes we hear are the good byes that tell us we're still alive.

May your first day in hell last ten thousand years, and may it be the shortest.

It didn´t occur to me until later that there´s another truth, very simple: greed in a good cause is still greed.

Head clear. Mouth shut. See much. Say little.

Ka works and the world moves on.

Definition Of A Wanderer: A guy who's always looking beyond

She put a hand on his hip and turned him to her. "But things could go wrong, so i want to tell you something while it's just the two of us, Eddie. I want to tell you how much I love you." She spoke simply, with no drama. I know you do," he said, "but I'll be damned if I know why." Because you made me feel whole," she said. "When I was younger, I used to vacillate between thinking love was this great and glorious mystery and thinking it was just something a bunch of Hollywood move producers made up to sell more tickets in the Depression, when Dish Night kind of played out." Eddie laughed. Now I think that all of us are born with a hole in our hearts, and we go around looking for the person who can fill it. You...Eddie, you fill me up.

We spread the time as we can, but in the end the world takes it all back.

Time is a face on the water

Wandering’s the most addictive drug there is, I think, and every hidden road leads on to a dozen more.

...first the smiles, then the lies. Last comes gunfire.

That life was richer,' a voice deep in his mind whispered. 'This one is truer,' whispered another, even deeper.

For Gilead and the Calla!" he roared. "Now, gunslingers! Now, you Sisters of Oriza! Now, now! Kill them! No Quarter! Kill them all!

But how you feel and how long you feel it doesn’t always have a lot to do with objective truth.

The expression Jake saw on all the faces, oldest to youngest, was the same: pure joy. Not just that, he thought, and remembered a phrase his English teacher had used about how some books make us feel: the ecstasy of perfect recognition.

If,” Roland said. “An old teacher of mine used to call it the only word a thousand letters long.

At first everything went according to plan and they called it ka. When things began going wrong and the dying started, they called that ka, too. Ka, the gunslinger could have told them, was often the last thing you had to rise above.

Legends grow beards, and twenty-three years is plenty of time to grow a long one.

No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves, don’t we?

If being a grown-up really meant knowing better, why did his father go on smoking three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day and snorting cocaine until his nose bled? If being a grown-up gave you some sort of special knowledge of the right things to do, how come his mother was sleeping with her masseuse, who had huge biceps and no brains?

Also, I suppose I wanted to say goodbye to someone, and have someone say goodbye to me. The goodbyes we speak and the goodbyes we hear are the goodbyes that tell us we're still alive, after all.

I don't know how you drink this straight. You're badass." "That's why I am your boss-

Thee’s a good man, Roland of Gilead.” He considered this, then slowly shook his head. “All my life I’ve had the fastest hands, but at being good I was always a little too slow.” She

Don't knock gossip." I pinched his hand. "It makes the world go round.

It's a wholly illogical but nonetheless powerful belief that things will change for the better in a new place; that the urge to self-destruct will magically disappear.

A man who can’t stay a bit shouldn’t approach in the first place. Good advice, I think, and not just for priests.

This situation is not quite beyond saving, but should you carry on much further - should you give voice to such thoughts - it will be.

Jake stood on the corner of Second and Forty-sixth, looking at a board fence about five feet high. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. From the darkness beyond the fence cam a strong harmonic humming. The sound of many voices, all singing together. Singing one vast open note. 'Here is yes,' the voices said. 'Here is you may. Here is the good turn, the fortunate meeting, the fever that broke just before dawn and left your blood calm. Here is the wish that came true and the understanding eye. Here is the kindness you were given and thus learned to pass on. Here is the sanity and clarity you thought were lost. Here, everything is all right.

God’s voice is still and small, the voice of a sparrow in a cyclone, so said the prophet Isaiah, and we all say thankya. It’s hard to hear a small voice clearly if you’re shitass drunk most of the time.

Bellator silvae servi. Warrior of the forest, I, the alpha, call on thee to serve in this time of need.

Ansel sighed. “You know, this is the problem with you alphas, you’re so concerned about taking over the new pack that you don’t notice what’s happening right in front of your face.

If being a grown-up really meant knowing better, why did his father go on smoking three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day?

Coincidence has been cancelled, honey,” Susannah said. “What we’re living in these days is more like the Charles Dickens version of reality.

For months - sometimes even years, as I tried to explain to you - time hardly seems to exist. Then everything comes in a gasp.

Time, Eddie had decided during this period, was in large part created by external events. When a lot of interesting shit was happening, time seemed to go by fast. If you got stuck with nothing but the usual boring shit, it slowed down. And when everything stopped happening, time apparently quit altogether. Just packed up and went to Coney Island. Weird but true.

During the morning chores, you look forward with love, during the evening ones, you look back with nostalgia." -Roland of Gilead, Wolves of the Calla, Chapter 6, Part One, Verse One

I wanted to leave. Every day the sun would set a little earlier, and every day I’d feel the call of those roads, those highways in hiding, a little more strongly. Some of it might have been the fabled geographic cure, to which I believe I have already alluded. It’s a wholly illogical but nonetheless powerful belief that things will change for the better in a new place; that the urge to self-destruct will magically disappear.

In our world you got your mystery and suspense stories . . . your science fiction stories . . . your Westerns . . . your fairy tales. Get it?” “Yes,” Roland said. “Do people in your world always want only one story-flavor at a time? Only one taste in their mouths?” “I guess that’s close enough,” Susannah said. “Does no one eat stew?” Roland asked.

The goodbyes we speak and the goodbyes we hear are the goodbyes that tell us we’re still alive, after all.

Such lack of understanding was frightening. He’s right, the gunslinger thought. We are broken. Gods help us.

Head clear. Mouth shut. See much. Say little.

Greed in a good cause is still greed.

He had great faith in Oy. Or maybe it was love. Or maybe those things were the same.

Sabine stood up, satisfied that her friends were safe and content. When she moved, Calla lifted her head. Her eyes focused in Sabine's direction. Despite the distance between them, Sabine Could have sworn Calla was looking right at her. The white wolf's ears flicked back and forth. She lifted her muzzle and howled. The sound filled Sabine with a mixture of sweetness and sorrow. The other wolves joined the song, their familiar voices blending in the winter air. Sabine watched them from another minute, then she turned and walked back to Ethan. "Everything okay?" he asked. She handed him the binoculars. "They're happy. So I'm happy." ... She turned, listening to the song carried on the stiff winter breeze. Nev's voice rose about the other wolves' as the chorus of howls wove through the air. Sabine wondered if somehow they knew she was here, and if they might be saying good-bye or if they were asking her to stay.

Never had he seen a man who looked so lonely, so far from the run of human life with its fellowship and warmth. To see him here, in this place of fiesta, only underlined the truth of him: he was the last. There was no other.

When I was younger, I used to vacillate between thinking love was this great and glorious mystery and thinking it was just something a bunch of Hollywood move producers made up to sell more tickets in the Depression, when Dish Night kind of played out." Eddie laughed. Now I think that all of us are born with a hole in our hearts, and we go around looking for the person who can fill it. You...Eddie, you fill me up.

Do people in your world always want only one story-flavor at a time? Only one taste in their mouths?

All I can do is say again what I’ve said already: when one isn’t sure about ka, it’s best to let ka work itself out. If one meddles, one almost always does the wrong thing.

Daca", repeta Roland. Un profesor de-al meu obisnuia sa spuna ca acesta este singurul cuvant cu o mie de litere.

Not all are called to the way of the sword or the gun or the ship,” Roland said, “but all serve ka.

Like the White Rabbit in Alice, I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date. They’re following me, you see, but I needed to double back and talk to you. Busy-busy-busy!

I am what ka and the King and the Tower have made me. We all are. We’re caught.

He’s a hothead and I’m a coward. Perhaps that’s why we’re friends—we fit around each other’s wrong places, make something that’s almost whole.

Eddie remembered the punchline of an old New York joke: “Pardon me, sir, can you tell me how to get to City Hall, or should I just go fuck myself?

hope you two boys can dig. There’ll be some digging to do.” “Graves?” Eddie asked, not sure if he was joking or not. “Graves come later.” Roland looked up at the sky, but the clouds had advanced out of the west and stolen the stars. “Just remember, it’s the winners who dig them.

Eddie saw great things and near misses. Albert Einstein as a child, not quite struck by a run-away milk-wagon as he crossed a street. A teenage boy named Albert Schweitzer getting out of a bathtub and not quite stepping on the cake of soap lying beside the pulled plug. A Nazi Oberleutnant burning a piece of paper with the date and place of the D-Day Invasion written on it. He saw a man who intended to poison the entire water supply of Denver die of a heart attack in a roadside rest-stop on I-80 in Iowa with a bag of McDonald’s French fries on his lap. He saw a terrorist wired up with explosives suddenly turn away from a crowded restaurant in a city that might have been Jerusalem. The terrorist had been transfixed by nothing more than the sky, and the thought that it arced above the just and unjust alike. He saw four men rescue a little boy from a monster whose entire head seemed to consist of a single eye. But more important than any of these was the vast, accretive weight of small things, from planes which hadn’t crashed to men and women who had come to the correct place at the perfect time and thus founded generations. He saw kisses exchanged in doorways and wallets returned and men who had come to a splitting of the way and chosen the right fork. He saw a thousand random meetings that weren’t random, ten thousand right decisions, a hundred thousand right answers, a million acts of unacknowledged kindness. He saw the old people of River Crossing and Roland kneeling in the dust for Aunt Talitha’s blessing; again heard her giving it freely and gladly. Heard her telling him to lay the cross she had given him at the foot of the Dark Tower and speak the name of Talitha Unwin at the far end of the earth. He saw the Tower itself in the burning folds of the rose and for a moment understood its purpose: how it distributed its lines of force to all the worlds that were and held them steady in time’s great helix. For every brick that landed on the ground instead of some little kid’s head, for every tornado that missed the trailer park, for every missile that didn’t fly, for every hand stayed from violence, there was the Tower. And the quiet, singing voice of the rose. The song that promised all might be well, all might be well, that all manner of things might be well.

Ka works, and the world moves on.

The wise man doesn't poke a sleeping bear with a stick.

There was a saying in Gilead: Let evil wait for the day on which it must fall.” “Uh-huh,” Eddie said. “There was a saying in Brooklyn: You can’t get snot off a suede jacket.

I know. But how you feel and how long you feel it doesn’t always have a lot to do with objective truth. With

I believe it lures people on to acts of terrible evil by whispering to them that they will do good. That they’ll make things not just a little better but all better.

I may look like Froggy the Gremlin, but in truth I’m Prince Fuckin Charming.

Might as well spit in the ocean

There was no serious talk during the meal (“Food and palaver don’t mix

Callahan spat out the word "fucking" in a kind of desperate snarl, as men do when vulgarity has become for them a kind of linguistic court of last resort.

I was just thinking that long life brings strange companions.

A feeling that all his hard decisions, all the pain and loss and spilled blood, had not been for nothing, after all. There was a reason. There was a purpose. There was life and love.

On the other side of Mid-World, Roland of Gilead, the last gunslinger, had drawn this divided woman to him and had created a third, who was far better, far stronger, than either of the previous two.

Some tale-tellers had her putting an end to Gray Dick after the second toast.(His: May your beauty ever increase. Hers: May your first day in hell last ten thousand years, and may it be the shortest.)

Eddie did, finishing with the required They lived happily ever after, and the gunslinger nodded. “No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves, don’t we?

Do you see how little it all matters? How quickly and easily I can take it all away, should I choose to do so? Beware, gunslinger! Beware, shaman! The abyss is all around you. You float or fall into it at my whim.

And the shooting will happen so fast and be over so quick that you'll wonder what all the planning and palaver was for, when in the end it always comes down to the same five minutes' worth of blood, pain, and stupidity.

There was a kind of willful stupidity about him. Eddie thought it was self-created and maybe propped up by his analyst, who would tell him about how he had to take care of himself, how he had to be the captain of his own ship, the author of his own destiny, respect his own desires, all that blah-blah. All the little code words and terms that meant it was all right to be a selfish fuck. That it was noble, even.

He gazed up at her seriously from the dust of the dooryard. He knew that however much she might love him, he would always love her more. And as always when he thought these things, the premonition came that ka was not their friend, that it would end badly between them.

Ka works and the world moves on.” Slightman

The Eld! The Eld!” the Manni whispered, and several raised fists into the air with the first and fourth fingers pointed.

We spread the time as we can, but in the end the world takes it all back.”“Aye,” she said. “So it does.

I know,' Roland said. 'And no matter. We spread the time as we can, but in the end the world takes it all back.

Every troublemaker’s excuse! Put it up your bum with the rest of the dirt!

Oy opened his eyes—they were bright in the darkness—then winked at Jake. After that, he appeared to go back to sleep. Jake

But if God made the world, then God made the drink. And that is also His will.” Ka, Roland thought.

Here is yes, the voices said. Here is you may. Here is the good turn, the fortunate meeting, the fever that broke just before dawn and left your blood calm. Here is the wish that came true and the understanding eye. Here is the kindness you were given and thus learned to pass on. Here is the sanity and clarity you thought were lost. Here, everything is all right.

dealing with drunks and hypes and homeless people who’ve got one foot in reality and the other in the Twilight Zone, you get used to seeing big changes in people, and usually not changes for the better. You teach yourself to see who’s under the new bruises and the fresh coats of dirt.

—¿Diríais que el mundo terminará envuelto en llamas o congelado, pistolero? Roland pensó en ello. —De ninguna de las dos formas —respondió al fin—. Creo que terminará sumido en la oscuridad.

No,” Roland said, “but it’s a fair tale. Tell it to the end, please.” Eddie did, finishing with the required They lived happily ever after, and the gunslinger nodded. “No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves, don’t we?” “Yeah,” Jake said.

To actually make you believe that your problems were spiritual and mental but absolutely not boozical. Good Christ, just the alcohol-related loss of the REM sleep was enough to screw you up righteously, but somehow you never thought of that while you were active. Booze turned your thought-processes into something akin to that circus routine where all the clowns come piling out of the little car.

Do people in your world always want only one story-flavor at a time? Only one taste in their mouths?” “I guess that’s close enough,” Susannah said. “Does no one eat stew?” Roland asked. “Sometimes at supper, I guess,” Eddie said, “but when it comes to entertainment, we do tend to stick with one flavor at a time, and don’t let any one thing touch another thing on your plate. Although it sounds kinda boring when you put it that way.

In any case,” Callahan said, “there’s always been a question as to whether the man who killed him acted alone, or whether he was part of a larger conspiracy. And sometimes I’d wake in the middle of the night and think, ‘Why don’t you go and see? Why don’t you stand in front of that door with the box in your arms and think, “Dallas, November 22nd, 1963”?

The doors slam shut behind them, much too loudly and hard enough to shiver in their frames. Executive assistants who drag down eighteen thousand a year to start with close doors a certain way - with respect for money and power - and this isn't it. This is the way angry drunks and addicts on the jones close doors. Also crazy people, of course. Crazy people are ace doorslammers.

There was a kind of willful stupidity about him. Eddie thought it was self-created and maybe propped up by his analyst, who would tell him about how he had to take care of himself, how he had to be the captain of his own ship, the author of his own destiny, respect his own desires, all that blah-blah. All the little code words and terms that meant it was all right to be a selfish fuck. That it was noble, even. When

Sin embargo, todavía sostiene el cuerno de Roland, el utilizado por Arthur Eld, o eso contaban las historias. No iba a devolverlo. «Porque lo toco mejor de lo que tú nunca lo hiciste —le dice a Roland, riendo—. Puedes volver a quedártelo cuando me muera. No te descuides de quitármelo, Roland, pues te pertenece.»

Won’t wash,” he said, very quietly. “Because of these. This is how they mark you, Slightman. This is your brand. You tell yourself you did it for your boy because it gets you to sleep at night. I tell myself that what I did to Jake I did so as not to lose my chance at the Tower . . . and that gets me to sleep at night. The difference between us, the only difference, is that I never took a pair of spectacles.” He wiped his hand on his pants. “You sold out, Slightman. And you have forgotten the face of your father.

Cort taught them to navigate by the sun and stars; Vannay showed them compass and quadrant and sextant and taught them the mathematics necessary to use them. Cort taught them to fight. With history, logic problems, and tutorials on what he called "the universal truths," Vannay taught them how they could sometimes avoid having to do so. Cort taught them to kill if they had to. Vannay, with his limp and his sweet but distracted smile, taught them that violence worsened problems far more often than it solved them. He called it the hollow chamber, where all true sounds became distorted by echoes.

In standard American English, the word with the most gradations of meaning is probably run. The Random House Unabridged Dictionary offers one hundred and seventy-eight options, beginning with “to go quickly by moving the legs more rapidly than at a walk” and ending with “melted or liquefied.” In the Crescent-Callas of the borderlands between Mid-World and Thunderclap, the blue ribbon for most meanings would have gone to commala. If the word were listed in the Random House Unabridged, the first definition (assuming they were assigned, as is common, in order of widest usage), would have been “a variety of rice grown at the furthermost eastern edge of All-World.” The second one, however would have been “sexual intercourse.” The third would have been “sexual orgasm, “as in Did’ee come commala’? (The hoped-for reply being Aye, say thankya, commala big-big.) To wet the commala is to irrigate the rice in a dry time; it is also to masturbate. Commala is the commencement of some big and joyful meal, like a family feast (not the meal itself, do ya, but the moment of beginning to eat). A man who is losing his hair (as Garrett Strong was that season), is coming commala. Putting animals out to stud is damp commala. Gelded animals are dry commala, although no one could tell you why. A virgin is green commala, a menstruating woman is red commala, an old man who can no longer make iron before the forge is-say sorry-sof’ commala. To stand commala is to stand belly-to-belly, a slang term meaning “to share secrets.