About
Title: The Institute Authors: Stephen King Category:supplementals Number of Highlights: 21 Date: 2025-11-05 Last Highlighted: **
Highlights
Great events turn on small hinges.
Tags:perspective
There was something else, as well, and it was powerful. He had been raised to be polite and obey his elders. Even in this situation, those were hard habits to break.
Rumors were okay. Rumors were self-generated disinformation.
Tags:favorite,misinformation
He was only twelve, and understood that his experience of the world was limited, but one thing he was quite sure of: when someone said trust me, they were usually lying through their teeth.
Around and around it went, and what was round had no point, any fool knew that.
“Trump and his cronies took it all back. They understand culture no more than a donkey understands algebra.”
Tags:lol
It came to him, with the force of a revelation, that you had to have been imprisoned to fully understand what freedom was.
Tags:freedom
Because it was chess now, and in chess you never lived in the move you were about to make, or even the next one. Three moves ahead, that was the rule. And three alternates to each of those, depending on what your opponent did.
Tags:strategy
What good would that do had become another mantra, and he recognized it was a bad way to think, a step down the path to acceptance of this place.
Debt was a commodity. It was bought and sold, and at some point it had become the center of not just the American economy, but of the world’s. And yet it did not really exist. It wasn’t a concrete thing like gas or gold or diamonds; it was only an idea. A promise to pay.
“Somebody up there likes me,” he whispered. Then he remembered his mother and father were dead, and thought, But not that much.
“Do you think memory is a blessing or a curse?” She didn’t have to think about it; God only knew what she was remembering. “Both, dear.”
Seventy years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated by atomic bombs, the world is still here even though many nations have atomic weapons, even though primitive human emotions still hold sway over rational thought and superstition masquerading as religion still guides the course of human politics.
There’s a town in Maine, Jerusalem’s Lot, and you could ask the people who lived there about the men in the black cars. If you could find any people, that is. They all disappeared forty or more years ago. George Allman talks about that town all the time.”
The tears finally dried up, and he began to feel something other than sorrow and loss—something harder. A kind of bedrock, previously unknown to him. It was a relief to know it was there.
Harry Cross got a mountain of scrambled eggs from the buffet, and shoveled them in (along with bacon and home fries) without looking up from his plate, like a man doing work.
One of the first things his mentor officer had taught him during the four months of his rookie probationary tour was you question perps. You never allow perps to question you.
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,”
Ernest Hemingway’s best short stories: They are miracles of compression.
Night knocker is an analog job in a digital age.
These memories were beautiful, and they stung like nettles.