She had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there was nothing physically wrong.

the snap of the breaking bone had not been loud, not loud but it had been very loud, HUGE, but not loud. Just enough of a sound to slit through the red fog like an arrow—but instead of letting in sunlight, that sound let in the dark clouds of shame and remorse, the terror, the agonizing convulsion of the spirit. A clean sound with the past on one

Tough old world, baby. If you’re not bolted together tightly, you’re gonna shake, rattle, and roll before you turn thirty.

The bewilderment seemed to grow and for a moment she saw his true face, the one he ordinarily kept so well hidden, and it was a face of desperate unhappiness, the face of an animal caught in a snare beyond its ability to decipher and render harmless.

Jack felt a wave of nearly desperate love for the boy. The emotion showed on his face as a stony grimness.

That’s your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what. Pull your act together and just go on.”

In that instant, kneeling there, everything came clear to him. It was not just Danny the Overlook was working on. It was working on him, too. It wasn’t Danny who was the weak link, it was him. He was the vulnerable one, the one who could be bent and twisted until something snapped.

Another sign—and they were multiplying all the time—that there was another human being in the place, not just a carbon copy of one of them or a combination of both. It made her a little sad. Someday her child would be a stranger to her, and she would be strange to him … but not as strange as her own mother had become to her. Please don’t let it be

His relationship with his father had been like the unfurling of some flower of beautiful potential, which, when wholly opened, turned out to be blighted inside. Until he had been seven he had loved the tall, big-bellied man uncritically and strongly in spite of the spankings, the black-and-blues, the occasional black eye.