Excerpts from Misery by Stephen King
"Paul remembered telling Bernstein, who had lost an aunt and a grandfather in the Holocaust, that he didn't understand why the Jews in Germany - hell all over Europe but especially in Germany - hadn't gotten out while there was still time. They were not, by and large, stupid people, and many had had first-hand experience of such persecution. Surely they had seen what was coming. So why had they stayed?
Bernstein's answer had struck him as frivolous and cruel and incomprehensible: Most of them had pianos. We Jews are very partial to the piano. When you own a piano, it's harder to think about moving.
Now he understood. Yes. At first it was his broken legs and crushed pelvis. Then, God help him, the book had taken off. In a crazy way he was even having fun with it. It would be easy - too easy - to blame everything on his broken bones, or the dope, when in fact so much had been the book. That and the droning passage of days with their simple convalescent pattern. Those things - but mostly the stupid goddamn book - had been his piano. What would she do if he was gone when she came back from her Laughing Place? Burn the manuscript?
'I don't give a fuck,' he said, and this was almost the truth. If he lived, he could write another book - re-create this one, even, if he wanted to. But a dead man couldn't write a book any more than he could buy a new piano." p. 192-193
"This was no pantry; this was a goddam supermarket. He supposed there was a certain symbolism in Annie's pantry - the ranks of goods had something to say about the murkiness of the borderline between the Sovereign State of Reality and the People's Republic of Paranoia. In his current situation, however, such niceties hardly seemed worth examination. Fuck the symbolism. Go for the food." p. 199-200
"The scenario had called for him to effect his escape through one of the parlor windows. He would take a hell of a thump, but he had already seen how fastidious Annie was about locking her doors. Better thumped than crisped, as he believed John the Baptist had once said.
In a book, all would have gone according to plan... but life was so fucking untidy - what could you say for an existence where some of the most crucial conversations of your life took place when you needed to take a shit, or something? An existence where there weren't even any chapters?" p. 353-354
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