Duma Key
“It was RED”
“Life is more than love and pleasure,
I came to dig for treasure.
If you want to play, you gotta pay,
You know it’s always been that way
We all came digging for treasure.”
“Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won’t carry a quitter. ”
“If I kept saying it; if I kept reaching out. My accident really taught me just one thing: the only way to go on is to go on. To say ‘I can do this’ even when you know you can’t.”
“We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.”
“God always punishes us for what we can’t imagine.”
“Art should be a place of hope.”
“because the hardest boss a man can ever have is himself.”
“Things slowed down for awhile. Sometimes that happens. The pot boils, and then, just before it can boil over, some hand — God, fate, maybe plain coincidence — lowers the heat. I mentioned this once to Wireman and he said life is like Friday on a soap opera. It gives you the illusion that everything is going to wrap up, and then the same old shit starts up on Monday.”
“A person’s memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It’s you.”
“In the end we always wear out our worries. That’s what Wireman says.”
“Remember that the truth is in the details. No matter how you see the world or what style it imposes on your work as an artist, the truth is in the details. Of course the devil’s there, too—everyone says so—but maybe truth and the devil are words for the same thing. It could be, you know.”
“The only religions I don’t like are the ones that insist their God is bigger than your God.”
“Art is the concrete artifact of faith and expectation, the realization of a world that would otherwise be little more than a veil of pointless consciousness stretched over a gulf of mystery.”
“I win, you win. You win, I win. The gun, I win. The fruit, you win. I win, you win.”
“Successful rebellions always begin in secret.”
“Healing is a kind of revolt…all successful revolts begin in secret.”
“I just didn’t want her to get hurt. I thought she was going to be. But everyone gets their share, don’t they? Sure. Pow, in the nose. Pow, in the eye. Pow, below the belt, down you go, and the ref just went out for a hot dog.”
“The loss of memory isn’t always the problem; sometimes–maybe even often–it’s the solution.”
“How do we remember to remember? That’s a question I’ve asked myself often since my time on Duma Key, often in the small hours of the morning, looking up into the absence of light, remembering absent friends. Sometimes in those little hours I think about the horizon. You have to establish the horizon. You have to mark the white. A simple enough act, you might say, but any act that re-makes the world is heroic. Or so I’ve come to believe.”
“Clear communication between selves – the surface self and the deep self – is the enemy of self-doubt. It slays confusion.”
“Do the day and let the day do you.”
“Stay hungry. It worked for Michelangelo, it worked for Picasso, and it works for a hundred thousand artists who do it not for love (although that might play a part) but in order to put food on the table. If you want to translate the world, you need to use your appetites. Does this surprise you? It shouldn’t. There’s no creation without talent, I give you that, but talent is cheap. Talent goes begging. Hunger is the piston of art.”
“…Elizabeth’s doze had deepened into real sleep. Once she might have been young and beautiful. Once she might have been some young man’s dream baby. Now she was snoring with her mostly toothless mouth pointed at the ceiling. If there’s a God, I think He needs to try a little harder.”
“And what do you do when you can’t use anger to fall back on? You admit the truth.”
“When it comes to the past, we all stack the deck.”
“I told myself there was time. Of course, that’s what we always tell ourselves, isn’t it? We can’t imagine time running out, and God punishes us for what we can’t imagine.”
“When I say truth, I mean beauty.”
“When I made pictures, I fell in love with the world. When I made pictures, I felt whole.”
“I thought there would be time, but we always think stuff like that, don’t we? We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.”
“The truth has to come out, that’s the basis of art. But that’s not to say the world must see it. Be brave. Don’t be afraid to draw the secret things. No one said art was always a zephyr; sometimes it’s a hurricane. Even then you must not hesitate or change course. Because if you tell yourself the great lie of bad art – that you are in charge – your chance of the truth will be lost. The truth isn’t always pretty.”
“Black is the absence of light, but white is the absence of memory, the color of can’t remember.”
“In the matter of learned skills, memory comes to a fork in the road. Down one branch are the it’s-like-riding-a-bicycle skills; things which, once learned, are almost never forgotten. But the creative, ever-changing forebrain skills have to be practiced almost daily, and they are easily damaged or destroyed.”
“the unconscious mind writes poetry if it’s left alone. Maybe”
“Duma Key”
Stephen King