Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it.
Stephen KingRead
Once, during the drinking phase, Wendy had accused him of desiring his own destruction but not possessing the necessary moral fiber to support a full-blown deathwish. So he manufactured ways in which other people could do it, lopping a piece at a time off himself and their family.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on self-destructive behavior and the inability to confront one's own mortality directly.
In this quote, Stephen King expresses the conflict within an individual who consciously desires self-destruction yet lacks the moral courage to fully embrace it. Instead of seeking his own end, he engages in actions that hurt himself and those around him, reflecting a deep-seated struggle with one's own choices and the impact they have on loved ones.
Themes
Self-DestructionMoral FiberDeathwishConfrontationFamily
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared during a discussion about personal struggles and the importance of seeking help.
More from Stephen King
All quotes →Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.
Stephen KingRead
Hairstyles change, and skirt lengths, and slang, but high school administrations? Never.
Stephen KingRead
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
Stephen KingRead
That's the day's business. Thinking. Thinking and isolation, because it doesn't matter if you pass the time of day with someone or not; in the end, you're alone. He seemed to have put in as many miles in his brain as he had with his feet. The thoughts kept coming and there was no way to deny them.
Stephen KingRead
Late last night and the night before, tommyknockers, tommyknockers knocking on my door. I wanna go out, don't know if I can 'cuz I'm so afraid of the tommyknocker man.
Stephen KingRead
Similar quotes
We are valued in this world at the rate we desire to be valued.
Jean De La BruyereRead
Realism is not a matter of any fidelity to an empirical reality, but of the discursive conventions by which and for which a sense of reality is constructed.
John FiskeRead
Abolish slavery tomorrow, and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution need be altered. It was purposely so framed as to give no claim, no sanction to the claim, of property in man. If in its origin slavery had any relation to the government, it was only as the scaffolding to the magnificent structure, to be removed as soon as the building was completed.
Frederick DouglassRead
The day nothing turns you on - you're dead. No matter how many more years you go on breathing.
Malcolm ForbesRead
Superstitious." What a strange word. If you believed in Christianity or Islam, it was called "faith". But if you believed in astrology or Friday the thirteenth it was superstition! Who had the right to call other people's belief superstition?
Jostein GaarderRead
There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
Henry JamesRead