There is a story in the book Night Shift, called 'The Mangler,' about a laundry machine that takes on a sort of malignant life. I worked in a laundry for about a year and a half after I got out of college. It was the only job I could find to support my wife and our first child. There was a fellow there that had no hands or forearms. He simply had hooks. This is one of the things that they don't tell you about when you become management. You have to wear a tie. It was this fellow's tie that did him in.

People can be stunningly unobservant.

The shining. It was a good name, a comforting name, because she had always thought of it as a dark thing.

I'm most afraid of losing my mind. You lose your identity, your sense of who you are, where you are.

If God gives you something you can do, why in God's name wouldn't you do it?

No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side. Or you don't.

Small towns harbor small imaginations.