Home > Work > Joyland
1 " I can't understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there's already so much pain in the world. "
― Stephen King , Joyland
2 " When you're twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It's only when you get to twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect you've been looking at the map upside down, and not until you're forty are you entirely sure. By the time you're sixty, take it from me, you're fucking lost. "
3 " Fifty yards ahead of us, a doe had come out of the woods. She stepped delicately over one rusty GS&WM track and onto the railbed, where the weeds and goldenrod were so high they brushed against her sides. She paused there, looking at us calmly, ears cocked forward. What I remember about that moment was the silence. No bird sang, no plane went droning overhead. If my mother had been with us, she'd have had her camera and would have been taking pictures like mad. Thinking of that made me miss her in a way I hadn't in years. "
4 " What I know now is that gallant young men rarely get pussy. Put it on a sampler and hang it in your kitchen. "
5 " When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction. "
6 " The world has given me a good life since then, I won't deny it, but sometimes I hate the world, anyway. Dick Cheney, that apologist for water boarding and for too long chief preacher in the Holy Church of Whatever it Takes, got a brand-new heart while I was writing this - how about that? He lives on; other people have died. "
7 " God and heaven lasted about four years longer than the Tooth Fairy "
8 " His mind is like that. On the inside, where he never smiles. "
9 " In the years since, I've discovered there's a lot to be said for boredom. "
10 " People think first love is sweet, and never sweeter than when that first bond snaps. You've heard a thousand pop and country songs that prove the point; some fool got his heart broke. Yet that first broken heart is always the most painful, the slowest to mend, and leaves the most visible scar. What's so sweet about that? "
11 " The last good time always comes, and when you see the darkness creeping toward you, you hold on to what was bright and good. You hold on for dear life. "
12 " My father had taught me - mostly by example - that if a man wanted to be in charge of his life, he had to be in charge of his problems. "
13 " All I can say is what you already know: some days are treasure. Not many, but I think in almost every life there are a few. That was one of mine, and when I'm blue -- when life comes down on me and everything looks tawdry and cheap, the way Joyland Avenue did on a rainy day -- I go back to it, if only to remind myself that life isn't always a butcher's game. Sometimes the prizes are real. Sometimes they are precious. "
14 " When you're twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It's only when you get to be twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect that you've been looking at the map upside down, and not until you're forty are you entirely sure. By the time you're sixty, take it from me, you're fucking lost. "
15 " It’s hard to let go. Even when what you’re holding onto is full of thorns, it’s hard to let go. Maybe especially then. "
16 " Love leaves scars. "
17 " Passing time adds false memories and modifies real ones. "
18 " On pense, OK, je ne me fais pas d'illusions, je me prépare au pire, mais on se cramponne à ce petit espoir, vous le savez bien, et c'est ça qui nous fout en l'air.C'est ce foutu espoir qui nous flingue. "
19 " Quand t'as vingt et un an, la vie est nette comme une carte routière. C'est seulement quand t’arrive à vingt-cinq que tu commences à soupçonner que tu tenais la carte à l'envers... et à quarante que t'en as la certitude. Quand t'atteins les soixante, alors là, crois moi t'es définitivement largué. "
20 " History is the collective and ancestral shit of the human race, a great big and ever-growin pile of crap. Right now we're standin at the top of it, but pretty soon we'll be buried under the doodoo of generations yet to come. That's why folks' clothes look so funny in old photographs, to name but a single example. And, as someone who's destined to be buried beneath the shit of your children and grandchildren, I think you should be just a leetle more forgiving. "