A Whole Lot of Salem Quotes

The following are quotes from Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. I do apologize that I have not provided page numbers—I read this book on my Kindle, therefore I have included the location numbers. Salem’s Lot was the seventeenth book that I read this year as part of my goodreads.com reading challenge.

“‘keep ‘ee out o’ Jerusalem’s wood lot, if ‘ee want to keep ‘ee guts in ‘ee belly!’ The warning took hold, and so did the name. It proves little, except that perhaps in America even a pig can aspire to immortality. (Loc 460-465)”

“The sky was beginning to lighten in the east, and on the fields between here and town, heavy dew sparkled like a king’s ransom of diamonds. (Loc 843-849)”

“His fingers were permanently yellowed with chalk dust rather than nicotine, but it was still the residue of an addicting substance. (Loc 1365-1369)”

“Fear that you might step on a pongee stick and see your foot swell up like some noxious green balloon, fear that some kid in black p.j.’s whose name you couldn’t even fit in your mouth might blow your head off with a Russian rifle, fear that you might draw a Crazy Jake on patrol that might want you to blow up everyone in a village where the Cong had been a week before. (Loc 1876-1882)”

“‘You asked me what I think. I’ll tell you. 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. (Loc 2413-2419)”

“She read them over and over again, and Mark was darned if he could see the sense in reading a book more than once. You knew how it was going to end. (Loc 2926-2933)”

“Crying was like pissing everything out on the ground. (Loc 2961-2965)”

“Dracula with his mouth open, showing his fangs, was menacing a girl lying on the ground while the Mad Doctor was torturing a lady on the rack and Mr. Hyde was creeping up on an old guy walking home. Understand death? sure. That was when the monsters got you. (Loc 2968-2974)”

“The fist crashing into the baby’s face, the tire cut open with a jackknife. the barroom brawl, the insertion of razor blades into Halloween apples, the constant, vapid qualifiers with the human mind, in all its labyrinthine twists and turns, is able to spew forth. (Loc 3186-3190)”

“Not all of them who waded into the waters of Lethe found it necessary to take a bath in it, but there were enough kids who had made dreams their protein. (Loc 3393-3397)”

“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…(Loc 4254)”

“If a fear cannot be articulated, it can’t be conquered. (Loc 4260)”

“Cory Bryant sank into a great forgetful river, and that river was time, and its waters were red. (4921-4929)”

“We know that aspirin is very close in chemical composition to LSD, but why should one cure the ache in the head and the other cause the head to fill up with flowers? Part of the reason we don’t understand is because we don’t really know what the brain is. The best-educated doctor in the world is standing on a low island in the middle of a sea of ignorance. (Loc 5242-5247)”

“They found themselves listening to the silence, fascinated by it. There did not even seem to be a faint, high hum that comes in utter stillness, the sound of nerve endings idling in neutral. There was only a great dead soundlessness and the beat of blood in their own ears. And yet they both knew, of course. They were not alone. (Loc 5887-5892)”

“The devil, according to gospel according to Freud, would be a gigantic composite id, the subconscious of all of us. (Loc 6311-6317)”

“The steady breeze that had allowed the flames to jump one firebreak now brought a steady fall of white ash over the town like summer snow. (Loc 7673-7677)”

“There was only the darkness, and she in it, dreaming or beginning to dream. She thought dimly that the dream would be sweet and long, but bitter underneath and without light, like the waters of Lethe. (Loc 7692-7700)”

“Whole country’s goin’ the same way. Me and Nolly went to a drive-in show up in Falmouth a couple of weeks ago, just before they closed her down for the season. I seen more blood and killin’s in that first Western than I seen both years in Korea. Kids was eatin’ popcorn and cheerin ’em on.’ He gestured vaguely at the town, now lying unnaturally gilded in the brokwn rays of the westering sun, like a dream village. ‘They prob’ly like bein’ vampires. (Loc 8291)”