Anyone who started reading at a young age likely has a few quotes from his books that have stayed with them. That's certainly the case for me, with quotes from Stephen King's books and movies prone to bouncing around in my head at various times, years after I first read them. King's prose has always resonated for me in a deep way, maybe because he's such a blue-collar writer and I come from blue-collar roots. Or maybe it's that the most fundamental truths in life are rarely complicated, nor do they require complicated words.

Either way, Stephen King's best quotes last, bubbling up when I least expect them. I certainly remember more lines from Stephen King than just about any classic author, and I say that as someone who has a Masters' degree in literature. What can I say? His books have just mattered more than almost any others, and so has writing. Fair warning, there will be a few quotes from The Dark Tower books on this list, but considering it's his magnum opus and this list is about the quotes that matter to me, that's okay.

I remember reading The Body, the novella that got turned into the childhood classic Stand By Me as a preteen. For a kid who often felt misunderstood and like I had too many thoughts to contain in my mind at any one time (unsurprisingly, I was later diagnosed with ADHD in my adult years), I often felt like no one truly understood me. Worse, when I tried to share what I really felt, it came out all jumbled and never landed with the gravitas or sincerity I felt inside. That's why the full quote resonated so strongly with me:

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”

I remember reading that quote when I was younger and the truth of it hit me so clearly that it almost took my breath away. We are all of us a universe inside, and sometimes, the things that are fundamental to our souls won't resonate with anyone else. Back then, I thought the message was that people just don't care. Now I know that it's about being able to hold whatever feelings and beliefs I have without needing external validation.

While this quote from The Drawing of the Three isn't exactly the most profound or deep of Stephen King's many quotable lines, it was memorable for me. For starters, it made me laugh aloud as it was such a succinct summary of who Roland was as a person: stoic, unfazed by bizarre situations, and able to assess with logical pragmatism a situation in which any of the rest of us would probably find quite a bit of dark humor.

Plus, he's right, and it occurred to me at the moment I read the scene where Roland and Eddie were engaged in the shootout with Balazar's men. I'd never actually thought about how hard it would be to be in a shooting, let alone to do it while naked and so vulnerable, but I guessed it would be pretty difficult. Roland's respect for Eddie transferred to me, and I viewed Eddie with my own newfound respect, seeing that in his drawing to be part of Roland's ka-tet, he had the potential to become a great character and worthy of Roland's quest to reach the Tower.

As a young person who was pretty ambivalent toward the existence or nonexistence of God, I never exactly spent a lot of time contemplating his plans for us. He was just sort of the big guy up there in the sky, floating around in the clouds and intermittently being benevolent and loving or vengeful and full of wrath. As a kid, things are generally pretty black and white: there are good people and there are bad people. You go to Heaven for a reward or Hell for a punishment. And, above all, death is the ultimate thing to be terrified of.

So this Stephen King quote in Desperation really threw my brain for a loop because it was the first time I had ever been confronted with the idea that someone might be forced to live as opposed to wanting to be alive. As a fairly sheltered kid who was lucky enough not to want for much, I was happy, and it was hard to conceive that a person's life could be so awful that death would have been less cruel. But the characters in King's book disabused me of that notion, and it was one of those many moments as a kid that I felt a big, fundamental "adult" truth take root in my brain for the first time.

I've written about this before, but Stephen King's short story "The Jaunt," particularly the ending, messed me up worse than just about anything I've ever read. The horror of a little kid not much younger than me having been driven completely mad by being trapped inside his mind and on his own for eternity haunted me - it never even occurred to me that that was possible. It reminded me, yet again, that in Stephen King's books, there was no guaranteed safety for children like me.

When Ricky gibbered and drooled, "Longer than you think, Dad! Longer than you think! Held my breath when they gave me the gas! Wanted to see! I saw! I saw! Longer than you think!" I didn't even fully grasp what it meant at the time, but it didn't matter. All I knew was that he went into the jaunting machine as a young, happy boy, and emerged as a mentally withered thing whose hair had gone completely white from the stress. The visual of him clawing out his own eyes in a gout of blood turned "Longer than you think!" into a horror I couldn't and didn't want to comprehend.

This quote may not have been in a fictional book, but it struck me deeply, and I never forgot it, just the same. Those who consider themselves Stephen King fans but haven't read On Writing, his half memoir and half how-to book, owe it to themselves to do so. King has been open about his struggles with addiction and substance abuse, and On Writing is a raw and unflinching look at that time, and a sober assessment of himself as both a man and writer in his younger years.

But King's book is also full of practical advice for aspiring writers, starting with the one above. On Writing came out when I was in college, then an English major, and it resonated: "you have to practice the craft" is what it said to me - because writing is a craft. I've been a professional editor and writer for years now, and that line rings truer now than ever. It's clear to me, as an editor, which young writers read widely and educate themselves because they genuinely want to improve, and which ones simply want to be people with opinions on the internet. There's a big difference, and it comes down to those who make a point to learn by reading and watching things.

OG Stephen King fans know that The Green Mile was originally published in serial format, being released in six separate parts throughout 1996 before it was combined into a full-length novel in 1997. I was 15 when I started reading it, and I thought the serial format was the coolest way to release a book, not knowing then at my young age that it was how so many classic authors back in the Victorian era and even later used to publish their books.

But more than the format, it was John Coffey's simple line, "I'm rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss." that killed me. Frank Darabont, as he so often did, made it even more eloquent in the 1999 movie adaptation: "I'm tired, boss," with Michael Clarke Duncan's exquisite delivery conveying so much weariness in three words. Still, the moment John Coffey finally revealed that he saw his gift as more of a curse in the book stuck with me. It never occurred to me until that line that the gentle giant's beautiful soul had been worn down, not by being imprisoned, but by the way he had always been in prison because of his abilities.

“I'm rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I'm tired of bein on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain. Not never havin no buddy to go on with or tell me where we's comin from or goin to or why. I'm tired of people bein ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I'm tired of all the times I've wanted to help and couldn't. I'm tired of bein in the dark. Mostly it's the pain. There's too much. If I could end it, I would. But I can't.”

I didn't read Dolores Claiborne right when it came out in 1992, but I read it a few years later when I was still in my young teenage years. I was a girl growing up with more traditionally-minded parents (in some ways), and I had been raised to think that being "ladylike" was the ultimate virtue for a girl. Being "nice" in all situations had been drilled into me by my mom, the positive long-term effects of which have been extremely debatable.

So the concept of being "a high-riding bitch" was one that intrigued me deeply because it was the first time that "the b-word" had ever been framed as a positive. I was aware, on some minor level, that the world is harder for women, but I read that quote and suddenly, a lightbulb went on. I felt like I understood more about the tougher, meaner, women I occasionally ran into: maybe it wasn't that they wanted to be, but that they had to be, thanks to how hard their lives were. As an adult, I now know that women don't owe the world "nice," but I have Dolores Claiborne to thank for first opening my eyes.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, like Dolores Claiborne, delivered another tough lesson about life, which is that it isn't fair. Not only is it not fair, it's also often cruel, and through no fault of your own. I was 18 years old when I read this one, and the protagonist of the story, Trisha, may have only been a 9-year-old girl, but I identified with her going through the dark terrors of being lost in the woods - albeit metaphorical in my case.

As an 18-year-old in college who was just starting to experience some of the problems and challenges of adulthood, but who was also still naive in ways, the reality of life slapped me in the face a few times harder than I realized it could - or at least it felt to me then. Like Trisha, I was quickly learning the world doesn't owe any of us a damn thing, but it's up to us to figure out how to navigate it. We can give up, or we can keep walking, but the world won't change itself whatever we decide.

Sometimes in your life, you read a book that makes you want to stand up in cheer. When the heroes you've followed long enough for them to become friends come to the end of the road, you're so invested in their stories that it's hard to remember they're works of fiction. That's how I felt at the end of The Dark Tower series, alternately wanting to whoop and cheer for Roland's ka-tet, and to grieve them as though my heart was breaking - and in many ways, it did.

But it cracked completely twice, and both had to do with Oy, the little billy-bumbler and faithful companion to Jake. The first was, "I, 'Ake," as Oy comforts Jake in the boy's dying moments. To this day, I don't know if Oy meant "I ache" or "Bye, Jake," and I'm still a little haunted by that. But the line that broke me completely was Roland's eulogy for the little bumbler: "The body was far smaller than the heart it had held." I think we feel that way about all our pets, which offer us nothing but unconditional love and a purpose.

I don't really need to say much here; any fellow Constant Reader will know why The Gunslinger's Creed, first seen in The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, is on this list and in the place of honor.

“I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I aim with my eye.

I do not shoot with my hand; he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I shoot with my mind.

I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father. I kill with my heart.”

It doesn't matter how many years have passed since I first read it, nor how old I am: I will always get chills when I read the creed that stamped upon so many of us.