Anyone have a favorite paragraph that is best represenative of SK?

[marew1]

It and The Green Mile.

[Wynter_21]

There are so many beautiful passages... I can't pick one!
The last paragraph of IT is pretty good though.

[LOTUS]

"I sit on the bench in front of Bell's Market and think about Homer Buckland and about the beautiful girl who leaned over to open his door when he come down that path with the full red gasoline can in his right hand - she looked like a girl of no more than sixteen, a girl on her learner's permit, and her beauty was terrible, but I believe it would no longer kill the man it turned itself on; for a moment her eyes lit on me, I was not killed, although a part of me died at her feet."

Dave in Mrs. Todd's Shortcut, Skeleton Crew.

"Maybe that's why God made us kids first and built us close to the ground, because He knows you got to fall down a lot and bleed a lot before you learn that one simple lesson. You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for... and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you."
Ben Hanscom, IT

[Prince of Darkness]

Hi,

@Chatterbox -- coming up!

"He awakens from this dream unable to remember exactly what it was, or much at all beyond the simple fact that he has dreamed about being a child again. He touches his wife's smooth back as she sleeps her warm sleep and dreams her own dreams; he thinks that it is good to be a child, but it is also good to be grownup and able to consider the mystery of childhood... its beliefs and desires. I will write about all of this one day, he thinks, and knows it's just a down thought, an after-dreaming thought. But it's nice to think so for awhile in the morning's clean silence, to think that childhood has its own sweet secrets and conforms mortality, and that mortality defines all courage and love. To think that what has looked forward must also look back, and that each life makes its own imitation of immortality: a wheel.

Or so Bill Denborough thinks on those early mornings after dreaming, when he almost remembers his childhood, and the friends with whom he shared it.

Also my favorite.

Long days and pleasant nights

[Samantha_]

There are many paragraphs that reflect a writing style that will reach out and grab you, for me, this is one paraphrased.

In Lisey's Story Stephen King writes about a young boy who in the early morning hour hears his father's radio, set to a country music channel, advertising for some discount furniture store in West Virginia the boy will never visit.

While the devastating relationship between the boy and father is the larger meaning of the chapter ; the lines create an aura around the setting that shook loose an old memory of listening to the radio with my grandparents.

One line captures a moment and regardless of the overall plot surrounding the line, you remember when... .

I read the line about the radio ad to my husband. He said, "You can't write that unless you've been there."

Stephen King writes like he's been there.

[JRLauer]

The Green Mile:

"We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long..."

Yeah, that's the one I'd go with. Srbo hit that nail on the head.

[robotman]

From IT:

"It's offense you maybe can't live with because it opens up a crack inside your thinking, and if you look down into it you see there are evil things down there, and they have little yellow eyes that don't blink, and there's a stink down there in that dark and after a while you think maybe there's a whole other universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything, he would have told them if he could. Go to your church and listen to your stories about Jesus walking on the water, but if I saw a guy doing that I'd scream and scream and scream. Because it wouldn't look like a miracle to me. It would look like an offense."
— Stephen King (It)

[bopropadop]

Another from It, speaking of the rash of disappearances:

"They weren't all found. No; they weren't all found. And from time to time wrong assumptions were made."

This is the lead paragraph of Chapter 6. Sets a very somber tone and captures so much, saying so little.

[mrbeer]

The Green Mile:

"We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long..."

LOL I got the chills after reading that.

I also agree about the last paragrapgh of IT. Everytime I finish that book I have to go back and read that paragraph a couple more times.

[cwalrus]

From The Stand:

“I know what he’s about but not who he is. He’s the purest evil left in the world. The rest of the bad is little evil. Shoplifters and sexfiends and people who like to use their fists. But he’ll call them. He’s started already. He’s getting them together a lot faster than we are. Before he’s ready to make his move, I guess he’ll have a lot more. Not just the evil ones that are like him, but the weak ones . . . the lonely ones . . . and the ones that have left God out of their hearts.”
“Maybe he’s not real,” Nick wrote. Maybe he’s just . . .” He had to nibble at the top of his pen and think. At last he added: “ . . . the scared, the bad part of all of us. Maybe we are dreaming of the things we’re afraid we might do.”
… Abby grasped what Nick meant right off. It wasn’t much different from the talk of the new preachers who had got on the land in the last twenty years or so. There wasn’t really any Satan, that was their gospel. There was evil, and it probably came from original sin, but it was in all of us and getting it out was as impossible as getting an egg out of its shell without cracking it. According to the way these new preachers had it, Satan was like a jigsaw puzzle – and every man, woman, and child on earth added his or her little piece to make up the whole. Yes, all that had a good modern sound to it; the trouble with it was that it wasn’t true. And if Nick was allowed to go on thinking that, the dark man would eat him for dinner.

___

(Not long after that Nick wrote that he doesn’t believe in God) _-paraphrased

The message relayed, he looked unhappily down at his shoes and waited for the explosion.
But she only chuckled, got up, and walked across to Nick. She took one of his hands and patted it. “Bless you, Nick, but that don’t matter. He believes in you.”