The Dark Tower Series

From BillionQuotes

This page is for quotations from The Dark Tower series of novels by Stephen King

Contents 1 Vol I: The Gunslinger 2 Vol II: The Drawing of the Three 3 Vol III: The Waste Lands 4 Vol IV: Wizard and Glass 5 Vol V: Wolves of the Calla 6 Vol VI: Song of Susannah 7 Vol VII: The Dark Tower

Vol I: The Gunslinger

• The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.

-Opening text

• Go then, there are other worlds than these.

-Jake

• I don't like people, they fuck me up.

• The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what looked like eternity in all directions. It was white and blinding and waterless and without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon and the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death. An occasional tombstone sign pointed the way, for once the drifted track that cut its way through the thick crust of alkali had been a highway. Coaches and buckas had followed it. The world had moved on since then. The world had emptied.

• The Tower. Somewhere ahead, it waited for him - the nexus of Time, the nexus of Size.

• The gunslinger waited for the time of the drawing and dreamed his long dreams of the Dark Tower, to which he would someday come at dusk and approach, winding his horn, to do some unimaginable final battle.

• It was a blade of grass. But it was purple.

Vol II: The Drawing of the Three

• Had he come this far just to die, then? He would not. And if he were to die in spite of his determination, he would die on his way to the Tower.

~ The Gunslinger

• The door had hinges, but they were fastened to nothing – or so it seems, the gunslinger thought. This is a mystery, a most marvelous mystery, but does it really matter? You are dying. Your own mystery – the only one that really matters to any man or woman in the end – approaches.

~ The Gunslinger

• When the only fast way you could get rid of the monkey on your back was to snap your spinal cord above that bunch of nerves, you were dealing with one heavy monkey.

~ Eddie Dean

• As Henry Dean, the great sage and eminent junkie would have put it, Flip-flop, hippety-hop, offa your rocker and over the top, life’s a fiction and the world’s a lie, so put on some Creedence and let’s get high.

~ Eddie Dean

• “Who are you?” Eddie screams at him.

“Your destiny, Eddie,” the gunslinger whispers.

• “There are people who need people to need them. The reason you don’t understand is because you’re not one of those people. You’d use me and then toss me away like a paper bag if that’s what it came down to. God fucked you, my friend. You’re just smart enough so it would hurt you to do that, and just hard enough so you’d go ahead and do it anyway. You wouldn’t be able to help yourself. If I was lying on the beach there and screaming for help, you’d walk over me as if I was between you and your goddamn Tower.”

~ Eddie

• “You’re a Tower Junkie, Roland.”

~ Eddie

• “Fault always lies in the same place, my fine babies: with him weak enough to lay blame.”

~ Cort

• In a world that was clearly going to hell head-first, what was so low about getting high?

~ Henry Dean

• “Won’t somebody please explain where I am and how I got here?” the woman in the wheelchair asked – almost pleaded.

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing, Dorothy,” Eddie said. “You ain’t in Kansas anymore.”

• If you have given up your heart for the Tower, Roland, you have already lost. A heartless creature is a loveless creature, and a loveless creature is a beast. To be a beast is perhaps bearable, although the man who has become one will surely pay hell’s own price in the end, but if you should gain your object? What if you should, heartless, storm the Dark Tower and win it? What could you do except degenerate from beast to monster? To gain one’s object as a beast would only be bitterly comic, like giving a magnifying glass to an elephaunt. But to gain one’s object as a monster…To pay hell is one thing. But do you want to own it?

• “Well,” Eddie said, “What was behind Door Number One wasn’t so hot, and what was behind Door Number Two was even worse, so now, instead of quitting like sane people, we’re going to go right ahead and check out Door Number Three. The way things have been going, I think it’s likely to be something like Godzilla or Ghidra the Three-Headed Monster, but I’m an optimist. I’m still hoping for the stainless steel cookware.”

~ Eddie

• “I love you, Eddie. You have tried so hard. Been so patient. So has he - ” she nodded toward the place where the gunslinger lay propped against the rocks, watching. “– but he is a hard man to love.”

~ Odetta Holmes

• Later, with strange galaxies turning in slow gavotte overhead, neither thought the act of love had ever been so sweet, so full.

~ Eddie and Odetta

• Control the things you can control, maggot. Let everything else take a flying fuck at you, and if you must go down, go down with your guns blazing.

~ Cort

• The thunder of his own guns filled him with stupid wonder.

~ Roland

• “I am three women…I who was; I who had no right to be but was; I am the woman you have saved. I thank you gunslinger.”

~ Susannah

Vol III: The Waste Lands

• Choo-Choo, thought Jake, and shuddered.

• Blaine is a pain, and that is the truth.

Vol IV: Wizard and Glass

• "It seemed to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended."

• "True love, like any other strong and addicting drug, is boring -- once the tale of encounter and discovery is told, kisses quickly grow stale and caresses tiresome... except, of course, to those who share the kisses, who give and take the caresses while every sound and color of the world seems to deepen and brighten around them. As with any other strong drug, true first love is really only interesting to those who have become its prisoners."

• 'The scariest, most terrifying thing that I fear?'

'Yes.'

'My Imagination.'

'I thought you were going to say "Fear, itself."'

'Then you have a small imagination.'

~Roland and Eddie

• “Oh, Christ. I left the world I knew to watch a kid try to put booties on a fucked-up weasel. Shoot me, Roland, before I breed.”

~Eddie Dean

Vol V: Wolves of the Calla

• Near them, stuck on the branch of a tree, had been a note from the being Roland had just missed killing in Palace: 'Renounce the Tower. This is your last warning.' Ridiculous, really. Roland would no more renounce the Tower than he'd kill Jake's pet billy-bumbler and then roast him on a spit for dinner. None of them would renounce Roland's Dark Tower. God help them, they were in it all the way to the end.

• And really, what could be so special about the number nineteen? Mystery Number, indeed.

~ Eddie

• 'No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves.'

~ Roland

• 'Do people in your world always want only one story flavor at a time? Only one taste in their mouths?'

~ Roland

• ...the whole world was losing its shit, going nineteen.

~ Jake

• 'Who's this Claudia y Inez Bachman?'

~ Eddie

• Now there was a fourth woman. She had been born out of the third in yet another time of stress and change. She cared nothing for Odetta, Detta, or Susannah; she cared for nothing save the new chap who was on his way. The new chap needed to be fed. The banqueting hall was near. That was what mattered and all that mattered.

This new woman, every bit as dangerous in her own way as Detta Walker had been, was Mia. She bore the name of no man's father, only the word that in the High Speech means mother.

• 'Here comes Mia, daughter of none!'

• 'Your imagination is a poor thing, Roland.'

~ Vannay

• Dreaming. But not just dreaming. This was todash, the passing between two worlds. Supposedly the Manni could do it. And supposedly some pieces of the Wizard's Rainbow could make you do it, whether you wanted to or not. One piece of it in particular.

They could get caught between and fall, Roland thought. Vannay said that, too. He said that going todash was full of peril. ~ Roland

• Water if God wills it, he reminded himself. About the great matters, Roland, you have no say.

Not a comfortable truth, especially for a man on a quest such as his, but one he's learned to live with. ~ Roland

• 'Time is a face on the water.'

Roland felt gooseflesh run up his arms. Somewhere - perhaps in a glaring, blood-colored field of roses still far from here - a rustie had just walked over his grave.

• 'You said there were other worlds than these,' Roland said, 'and there are. New York in all its multiple whens is only one of many. That we are drawn there again and again has to do with the rose. I have no doubt of that, nor do I doubt that in some way I do not understand the rose is the Dark Tower. Either that or-'

'Or it's another door,' Susannah murmured. 'One that opens on the Dark Tower itself.'

• 'Because of changes in time - a softening of time which I know you all have felt - I've quested after the Dark Tower for over a thousand years, sometimes skipping over whole generations the way a sea-bird may cruise from one wave-top to the next, only wetting its feet in the foam. Never in all this time did I come across one of these doors between the worlds until I came to the ones on the beach at the edge of the Western Sea. I had an idea what they were, although I could have told you something of todash and the bends o' the rainbow.'

~ Roland

• 'Do you know you come to the line of Eld?' Roland asked in that same curiously gentle voice. He stretched a hand towards Eddie, Susannah, and Jake. Even toward Oy. 'For these are mine, sure. As I am theirs. We are round, and roll as we do. And you know what we are.'

' Are you?' Callahan asked. 'Are you all?'

• Eddie had known who they were since River Crossing, when the old people had knelt in the street to Roland. Hell, he'd known since the woods (what he still thought of as Shardik's woods), where Roland had taught them to aim with the eye, shoot with the mind, kill with the heart. Not three, not four. One. That Roland should finish them so, complete them so, was horrible. He was filled with poison and had kissed them with his poisoned lips. He had made them gunslingers, and had Eddie really thought there was no work left for the line of Arthur Eld in the mostly empty and husked-out world? That they would simply be allowed to toddle along the Path of the Beam until they got to Roland's Dark Tower and fixed whatever was wrong there? Well, guess again.

~ Eddie

• 'We deal in lead.'

~ Roland

• 'Three is a number of power.'

~ Roland

• 'I have an object of great power.'

~ Callahan

• 'We're bound to do as you ask, if we judge your Calla in the White and those you call Wolves as agents of the outer dark: Beam-breakers, if you ken.'

~ Roland

• A tear spilled down Callahan's right cheek, then another. He wiped them away absently. 'I've never dared handle it, but I've seen it. Felt its power. Christ the Man Jesus help me, I have Black Thirteen under the floorboards of my church. And it's come alive. Do you understand me?' He looked at them with his wet eyes. 'It's come alive.'

• There was a part of her - a spiteful Detta Walker part - that would always resent Roland's ascendancy in her heart and mind, but for the most part she recognized him for what he was: the last of his kind. Maybe even a hero.

~ Susannah

• It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.

~ Susannah

• 'Thunderclap,' she said in a voice Eddie could barely hear. 'None go there.'

'Why?' 'It's dark there,' she said, still not looking up from her lap. Then she raised an arm. This time she pointed in the direction from which Roland and his friends had come. Back toward Mid-World.'There,' she said, 'the world is ending. Or so we're told. And there...' She pointed east and now raised her face to Eddie's. 'There, in Thunderclap, it's already ended. In the middle are we, who only want go our own way in peace.' ~ Zalia

• 'Thankee-sai, long days, kiss my ass and go to heaven.'

~ Eddie

• ...when it came to pulling coals out of a hot fire, he'd put two dollars on Roland of Gilead for every one he put on God and the Man Jesus, those heavenly gunslingers.

~ Eddie (about Callahan)

• 'It's the Way of the Eld. We are of that an-tet, khef and ka, watch and warrant. Gunslingers, do ya.'

~ Roland

• 'When the shooting starts, we kill what moves.'

~ Roland

• Roland was as much a prisoner of his rules and traditions as Eddie had ever been of heroin.

~ Eddie

• The gunslinger's initial feelings for Eddie had wavered between caution and contempt for what Roland saw as his weakness of character. Respect had come more slowly. It had begun in Balazar's office, when Eddie had faught naked. Very few men Roland had known could have done that. It had grown with his realization of how much Eddie was like Cuthbert. Then, on the mono, Eddie had acted with a kind of desperate creativity that Roland could admire but never equal. Eddie Dean was possessed of Cuthbert Allgood's always puzzling and sometimes annoying sense of ridiculous; he was also possessed Alain John's deep flashes of intuition. Yet in the end, Eddie was like neither of Roland's old friends. He was sometimes weak and self-centered, but possessed of deep reservoirs of courage and courage's good sister, what Eddie himself sometimes called 'heart'.

• First come smiles, then comes lies. Last is gunfire.

~Roland

Vol VI: Song of Susannah

Vol VII: The Dark Tower

• The bumbler did not bite, but said a single word. "Olan," said he. Then he lowered his head, uttered a single sigh, and died.