One night when my longing for her was like a fire burning out of control in my heart and my head, I wrote her a letter that just seemed to go on and on. I poured out my whole heart in it, never looking back to see what I'd said because I was afraid cowardice would make me stop. I didn't stop, and when a voice in my head clamored that it would be madness to mail such a letter, that I would be giving her my naked heart to hold in her hand, I ignored it with a child's breathless disregard of the consequences.

A child blind from birth doesn't even know he's blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it.

Although emotionally delicate and eminently bruisable, teenagers are short on empathy. That comes later in life, if it comes at all.

I started after him...and the clown looked back. I saw Its eyes, and all at once I understood who It was." "Who was it, Don?" Harold Gardner asked softly. "It was Derry," Don Hagarty said. "It was this town.

And she sees that the moonlight is losing its orange glow. It has become buttery, and will soon turn to silver.

All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one.

If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples. I'll love your face no matter what it looks like. Because it's yours.