Stephen King, The Green Mile
21 quotes
"Everyone— black as well as white— thinks it's going to be better over the next jump of land."
"Sometimes, the embers are better then the campfire. It's strange, but it's true."
"About halfway through I broke down crying, which I hadn't expected. I was a little ashamed, but only a little;it was her, you see, and she never taxed me with the times that I slipped from the way I thought a man should be...the way I thought I should be, at any rate. A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God's creatures, and one without must be among the most miserable, I think, the only true blessing of their lives that they don't know how poorly off they are."
"There was a beautiful feeling of calm in my groin, a sense of peace so remarkable it was almost ecstasy——anyone who' suffered bad pain and then recovered will know what I'm talking about."
"Then, for no reason I could tell you, I tossed the spool again, even though Elaine had asked me not to. Maybe only because, in a way, him chasing a spool was like old people having their slow and careful version of sex - you might not want to watch it , you who are young and convinced that, when it comes to old age, an exception will be made in your case, but they still want to do it."
"Time takes it all, whether you want it or not. Time takes it all, time bears it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again."
"The person healed has an obligation to then ask why— to meditate on God's will, and the extraordinary lengths to which God has gone to realize His will."
"Like some dogs: kick them once and they never trust you again, no matter how nice you are to them."
"A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God's creatures, and one without must be among the most miserable, I think, the only true blessing of their lives that they don't know how poorly off they are."
"What our parents tell us when we are small seldom goes ignored, no matter how foolish it may be"
"I'm rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I'm tired of bein on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain. Not never havin no buddy to go on with or tell me where we's comin from or goin to or why. I'm tired of people bein ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I'm tired of all the times I've wanted to help and couldn't. I'm tired of bein in the dark. Mostly it's the pain. There's too much. If I could end it, I would. But I can't."
"That— we seemed to have decided without saying a word— might go a long way toward spoiling something that was special, and beautiful, by virtue of its strangeness and delicacy."
"It would not do to tell other people, not just because they wouldn't believe but because they wouldn't care."
"A left turn meant life - if you called what went on in the sunbaked exercise yard life, and many did; many lived it for years, with no apparent ill effects."
"When you spend your life taking care of mudmen, you can't help getting a little dirty yourself."
"He was nothing but a conduit, after all, and there isn't a culvert in the world that remembers the water flowed through it once the rain has stopped."
"It was sweet and lovely, that smile, perhaps the more so because it wasn’t complicated by much in the way of thought."
"…but I guess you can never wash anything completely away, not from this dark glass of a world, and now I saw them again, a tangle of names overlying one another, and looking at them was like listening to the dead speak and sing and cry out for mercy."
"The inmates made jokes about the chair, the way people always make jokes about things that frighten them but can't be gotten away from."
"The wide corridor up the centre of E Block was floored with linoleum the colour of tired old limes, and so what was the Last Mile at other prisons was called the Green Mile at Cold Mountain."
"...some of it's how he acts like he's King Shit of Turd Mountain, but mostly it's that he's sneaky, and he likes to hurt"