Stephen King's Most Iconic Quotes in Literature
Longtime constant readers of Stephen King all have their favourite quotes from his books and short stories, but some of the king's quotes are iconic among the rest. If an author is lucky, they'll have a few gems of a line in their careers by the time they call it quits. In a career like Stephen King's, however, one that spans more than half a century, almost 70 books and counting, and hundreds of short stories, there are even more, hence the dozens of iconic lines in Stephen King's books.
It's a testament to his skill that those lines are not just limited to his horror novels, but also to Stephen King's great non-horror books, of which there are many. While the author used to be written off in the early decades of his career as being low-brow and too blue-collar in his prose, that's precisely what makes his work stick. He knew even as a young writer what other more celebrated authors of the time didn't: life's greatest truths are often the simplest. It's that ethos that runs through all his best quotes.
10 "Maybe I did it because kids need to know that sometimes dead is better."
Pet Sematary
It's hard for anyone who knows Pet Sematary not to immediately hear Fred Gwynne saying, "Sometimes, dead is bettah" in that heavy Maine accent. But the original quote is a bit longer and the full conversation between Jud Crandall and Louis Creed is layered with meaning. Humans have always had a hard time grappling with and accepting death, and when that death happens unexpectedly or comes too soon, sometimes the acceptance doesn't happen at all.
Jud watches Louis and Rachel grieve the loss of their two-year-old son, Gage, and knows what grief can do to a person. He knows the lengths it might drive them to - and he knows what happens to the things that come back from the cursed burial ground, as he's seen it happen before. The best Stephen King quotes are the ones rooted in fundamental truth, and there is no truer truth than that. Death is unforgiving - but something that comes back without its soul is even worse.
9 "Death is when the monsters got you."
'Salem's Lot
Unsurprisingly, many of Stephen King's most memorable quotes are related to death - it's impossible not to when his characters spend so much time with it. But King has always also had a knack for writing children, especially the way children understand and accept the nightmares of the world in a way adults have lost. Mark Petrie certainly does in 'Salem's Lot. In his heart, he knows monsters are real, even before he gets proof in the form of vampires.
A monster gets all of us in the end, whether a car crash, a serial killer, heart disease, or time. Sometimes children get to the heart of other things in ways adults can't, including death. Kids, even precocious ones like Mark Petrie, may not understand the layers and nuances involved with death - but in the end, maybe they don't have to.
8 "Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win."
The Shining (2001 Reprint)
It's not just within the fictional pages of his books that Stephen King often drops nuggets of wisdom. They often come in his forewords and introductions, too, truths about life and living that only someone who has grappled with their own monsters can understand. In this case, it's King writing about how he made a deliberate choice to make The Shining's Jack Torrance more than just a two-dimensional villain, opted to make him something more complex and real, clearly seeing himself and his own addictions at the time in Jack.
In the end, it's what makes Jack so tragic and so scary: his story is the story of so many. His monster is alcoholism. His ghost is the trauma gifted to him by his abusive father. And while literal ghosts started Jack's slide into becoming the villain of the story, in the real world, it's not necessary.
It's an all-too-common story that someone's addictions and trauma turn them into monsters themselves. Sometimes, a person breaks free of the cycle, as King himself did. But with others, the monsters win - maybe only once or twice, maybe not forever - but they win. In Jack's case, it's forever.
7 "Go then, there are other worlds than these."
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger
There are a few Dark Tower quotes that have become seared in readers' brains thanks to their timing in the larger story or their meaning for the whole. One of those quotes comes from Jake Chambers, just before Roland allows Jake to plunge to his death, such is his desire not to lose his pursuit of the man in black in The Gunslinger. It's a line that shows exactly who Jake will grow to be in The Dark Tower series.
At just 11 years old, he's wise and prescient in a way the other characters are not, including Roland with his limited imagination. His last words to Roland say so much about how he has accepted the reality of multiple worlds and knows death isn't the end.
6 "Longer than you think, Dad! Longer than you think!"
The Jaunt
There are few longtime Stephen King readers who can see the words, "Longer than you think!" and not feel an immediate cringe. King's short stories have always been as scary as his novels, and sometimes even scarier thanks to them offering their horror in concentrated doses, distilled down to the very essence of the nightmarish ideas at their cores. "The Jaunt" is up there with the most terrifying of Stephen King's short stories.
It's impossible for the human mind to grasp the vastness of "forever," whether that be in time or the cosmos. Ricky's mad shrieks and giggles after his mind has completely snapped after being trapped alone in an eternity of time and space give readers no other choice but to contemplate what it might have been like for the little boy.
5 "It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living or get busy dying."
Rita Haworth and the Shawshank Redemption
Some of King's most successful stories show that he's not just mastered the art of horror, but the art of humanity - horror is just the most primal place to start. Novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption showed exactly that, as one of the most human and hopeful stories the author has ever penned. That's even how it ends: "I hope."
The 1994 film adaptation directed by Frank Darabont was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, the most ever for a Stephen King adaptation. In 2015, the United States Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry.
Protagonist Andy Dufresne, unlike the other characters, knows that hope isn't something that just comes to you; it's something you have to cultivate. Every day, each person has to wake up and choose to believe things will get better, that they can change things, to refill that well of hope. Anything else is just a slow death by degrees of attrition.
4 "The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there... and still on your feet."
The Stand
Just like Andy Dufresne, Stephen King's protagonists are almost always ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and it's watching them navigate those circumstances that makes them so compelling. It's often said that you can't truly know who a person is until they face the worst moment of their lives, and for King's characters, their arcs often start in those moments. Some rise to the challenge. Others fail.
We rarely get to pick the time and place that we face down our monsters, and we will never be ready.
King's most memorable heroes are the ones like his crew in The Stand: regular people who look around and realize no one is coming to save them-they have to save themselves. The line speaks another truth: it doesn't matter that you do what's right perfectly, just that you do it.
We usually take a few hits right on the chin first. But in the end, what matters isn't the how or the where you make a stand. The only thing that matters is that you stood.
3 "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12 - Jesus, did you?"
The Body
Stand By Me may be one of the most beloved Stephen King screen adaptations, but first, it was a novella titled The Body. King doesn't just have a knack for capturing childhood monsters, but just capturing childhood, period. In particular, King has always excelled at writing that very specific period of time between childhood and teenage years, when childhood innocence starts to transition into teenage desires, but also a growing awareness of the darker reality of the world.
If you're lucky, the world is still kind and easy then, and the friendships you have then are how you feel about so many things in life at that age: that they will last forever.
Maybe it's the turmoil or hormones, or maybe it's that that threshold has such a specific feeling in each of our lives, but childhood friends often burn the brightest. Or maybe it's just the simplicity of childhood friendship: no romantic relationships to distract you. No teenage stress of finals and college applications and breakups.
If you're lucky, the world is still kind and easy then, and the friendships you have then are how you feel about so many things in life at that age: that they will last forever. And sometimes they do - just in your memory. It's the bittersweetness in such a short line that makes it one of King's best.
2 "We all float down here!"
IT
There have been many Stephen King villains over the years, but there has never been one like Pennywise. He did to clowns what Jaws did to sharks, turning them from a largely harmless entity into something sinister and diabolical. In the case of sharks, it was undeserved. In the case of Pennywise, one could argue it was very much deserved, that there has always been something inherently creepy about clowns, even before It.
But Pennywise elevated the creepiness of clowns into nightmarish proportions thanks to the vastness of reality showing at the edges of its buffoonish form. The clown was merely a container for the cosmic, Lovecraftian entity within. It's fitting that its best-known quote, a variation of one he repeats throughout, is one that, out of context, makes absolutely no sense.
But it's not the strangeness of the quote that makes it so terrifying. It's that it symbolizes the unending horrors of Pennywise's true nature, an alienness impossible for the human mind to understand. We don't quite know what it means; we just know enough to shudder when we hear it.
1 "The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed."
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger
On a list of most iconic Stephen King quotes, could there be any other than this, the quote that started it all? One could argue that the line that actually started it all is from Carrie - "News item from the Westover (Me.) weekly Enterprise, August 19, 1966: RAIN OF STONES REPORTED" - and technically, they'd be correct. But only technically. Constant readers know the spiritual start of Stephen King's universe was the first line of The Gunslinger: "The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed."
"The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed."
It is a deceptively simple line that describes a deceptively simple setup. It was hard for anyone to know then, including Stephen King himself, that it would become the linchpin of his magnum opus, one of the greatest modern fantasy series and the framework that holds his entire sprawling literary multiverse together. Dozens and dozens of books and hundreds of short stories later, and The Dark Tower is what literally and figuratively holds Stephen King's universe together, connection by connection. As King himself writes in the final book,
"The road and the tale have both been long, would you not say so? The trip has been long and the cost has been high... but no great thing was ever attained easily. A long tale, like a tall Tower, must be built a stone at a time."
