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“Little Blaine: You're making him angry. Oh, you're making him SO angry.
Eddie: (kindly) Get lost, squirt. (to Blaine) Answer this one, Blaine: the big moron and the little moron were fighting on the bridge over the River Send. The big moron fell off. How come the little moron didn't fall off, too?
Blaine: THAT IS UNWORTHY OF OUR CONTEST. I WILL NOT ANSWER.
Roland: (with blazing eyes) What do you say, Blaine? I would not understand you well. Are you saying that you cry off?
Blaine: NO! OF COURSE NOT! BUT--
Roland: Then answer, if you can. Answer the riddle.
Blaine: (gratingly) IT'S NOT A RIDDLE! IT'S A JOKE, SOMETHING FOR STUPID CHILDREN TO CACKLE OVER IN THE PLAY YARD!
Roland: (confidently) Answer now or I declare the contest over and our winner. You must answer, for it is stupidity you complain of, not transgression of the rules, which we agreed upon mutually.
Blaine: (clicking his tongue loudly and gratingly, causing Eddie to wince and Oy to flatten his ears against his skull; a pause of three seconds, then, sulkily) THE LITTLE MORON DID NOT FALL OFF BECAUSE HE WAS A LITTLE MORE ON. MORE PHONETIC COINCIDENCE. TO EVEN ANSWER SUCH AN UNWORTHY RIDDLE MAKES ME FEEL SOILED.”
― Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

“Eddie: Why do police lieutenants wear belts?
The lights in the Barony coach began to flicker. An odd thing was happening to the walls, as well; they began to fade in and out of true, lunging toward transparency, perhaps, and then opaquing again. Seeing this phenomenon even out of the corner of his eye made Eddie feel a bit whoopsie.
Eddie: Blaine? Answer.
Roland: (agreeably) Answer. Answer, or I declare the contest at an end and hold you to your promise.
Blaine: TO...TO HOLD UP THEIR PANTS? (repeating as a statement) TO HOLD UP THEIR PANTS. A RIDDLE BASED UPON THE EXAGGERATED SIMPLICITY OF--
Eddie: Right. Good one, Blaine, but never mind trying to kill time--it won't work. Next--
Blaine: I INSIST YOU STOP ASKING THESE SILLY--
Eddie: Then stop the mono. If you're that upset, stop right here, and I will.
Blaine: NO.
Eddie: Okay, then, on we go. What's Irish and stays out in back of the house, even in the rain?
Blaine: (clicking his tongue deafeningly and gratingly; a long pause) PADDY O'FURNITURE.”
― Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

“Little Blaine: Stop! Stop it, you're killing him!
Eddie: (in his mind) What do you think he's trying to do to us, squirt?
He considered shooting Blaine one Jake had told while they'd been sitting around the campfire that night and then didn't. He wanted to stick further inside the bounds of logic than that one allowed...and he could do it. He didn't think he would have to get much more surreal than the level of, say, a third-grader with a fair-to-good collection of Garbage Pail Kids cards in order to fuck Blaine up royally...and permanently. Because no matter how many emotions his fancy dipolar circuits had allowed him to mimic, HE was still an IT--a computer. Even allowing Eddie this far into riddledom's Twilight Zone had caused Blaine's sanity to totter.
Eddie: Why do people go to bed, Blaine?
Blaine: BECAUSE...BECAUSE...GODS DAMN YOU, BECAUSE...BECAUSE THE BED WON'T COME TO THEM, GODS DAMN YOU!
Eddie: Give up, Blaine. Stop before I have to blow your mind completely. If you don't quit, it's going to happen. We both know it.
Blaine: NO!
Eddie: I got a million of these puppies. Been hearing them my whole life. They stick to my mind the way flies stick to flypaper. Hey, with some people it's recipes. So what do you say? Want to give?
Blaine: NO!
Eddie: Okay, Blaine. You asked for it. Here comes the cruncher. Why did the dead baby cross the road? (later) It crossed the road because it was stapled to the chicken, you dopey fuck!”
― Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

“What's the difference between a truckload of bowling balls and a truckload of dead woodchucks? You can't unload a truckload of bowling balls with a pitchfork!”
― Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

“Say, Blaine, you ugly, sadistic fuck! Since we're talking riddles, what is the greatest riddle of the Orient? Many men smoke but Fu Manchu! Get it? No? So solly, Cholly! How about this one? Why'd the woman name her son Seven and a Half? Because she drew his name out of a hat!”
― Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

“That's bullshit, buddy. And you know it.
The trouble was, he DIDN'T know it. He had come face to face with something Susannah had found out for herself after shooting the bear: he could TALK about how he didn't want to be a gunslinger, how he didn't want to be tramping around this crazy world where the three of them seemed to be the only human life, that what he really wanted more than anything else was to be standing on the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street, popping his fingers, munching a chili-dog, and listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival blast out of his Walkman earphones as he watched the girls go by, those ultimately sexy New York girls with their pouty go-to-hell mouths and their long legs in short skirts. He could talk about those things until he was blue in the face, but his heart knew other things. It knew that he had ENJOYED blowing the electronic menagerie back to glory, at least while the game was on and Roland's gun was his own private handheld thunderstorm. He had ENJOYED kicking the robot rat, even though it had hurt his foot and even though he had been scared shitless. In some weird way, that part--the being scared part--actually seemed to add to the enjoyment.
All that was bad enough, but his heart knew something even worse: that if a door leading back to New York appeared in front of him right now, he might not walk through it. Not, at least, until he had seen the Dark Tower for himself. He was beginning to believe that Roland's illness was a communicable disease.”
― Stephen King, The Waste Lands

“Somebody bring the Thorazine and the straitjacket," Eddie called. "Roland just went over the high side."
Roland paid no attention to this; he was coming to understand that Eddie's jokes and his clowning were his way of dealing with stress.”
― Stephen King, The Waste Lands

“I do not shoot with my hand,'" Eddie said. He suddenly felt far away, strange to himself. It was the way he'd felt when he had seen first the slingshot and then the key in pieces of wood, just waiting for him to whittle them free ... and at the same time this feeling was not like that at all.
Roland was looking at him oddly. "Yes, Eddie, you say true. A gunslinger shoots with his mind. What have you thought of?"
"Nothing." He might have said more, but all at once a strange image-a strange memory-intervened: Roland hunkering by Jake at one of their stopping-points on the way to Lud. Both of them in front of an unlit campfire. Roland once more at his everlasting lessons. Jake's turn this time. Jake with the flint and steel, trying to quicken the fire. Spark after spark licking out and dying in the dark. And Roland had said that he was being silly. That he was just being ... well ... silly.
"No," Eddie said. "He didn't say that at all. At least not to the kid, he didn't."
"Eddie?" Susannah. Sounding concerned. Almost frightened.
Well why don't you ask him what he said, bro? That was Henry's voice, the voice of the Great Sage and Eminent Junkie. First time in a long time. Ask him, he's practically sitting right next to you, go on and ask him what he said. Quit dancing around like a baby with a load in his diapers.
Except that was a bad idea, because that wasn't the way things worked in Roland's world. In Roland's world everything was riddles, you didn't shoot with your hand but with your mind, your motherfucking mind, and what did you say to someone who wasn't getting the spark into the kindling? Move your flint in closer, of course, and that's what Roland had said: Move your flint in closer, and hold it steady.
Except none of that was what this was about. It was close, yes, but close only counts in horseshoes, as Henry Dean had been wont to say before he became the Great Sage and Eminent Junkie. Eddie's memory was jinking a little because Roland had embarrassed him ... shamed him ... made a joke at his expense ...
Probably not on purpose, but ... something. Something that had made him feel the way Henry always used to make him feel, of course it was, why else would Henry be here after such a long absence?”
― Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

“Roland: This is as light as a feather, yet no man can hold it for long.

Blaine: (without hesitation) ONE'S BREATH.

Yet he did hesitate, Eddie thought suddenly. Jake and Susannah were watching Roland with agonized concentration, fists clenched, willing him to ask Blaine the right riddle, the stumper, the one with the Get the Fuck Out of Jail Free card hidden inside it; Eddie couldn't look at them-Suze, in particular-and keep his concentration. He lowered his gaze to his own hands, which were also clenched, and forced them to open on his lap. It was surprisingly hard to do. From the aisle he heard Roland continuing to trot out the golden oldies of his youth.”
― Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

“Roland: Riddle me this, Blaine: If you break me, I'll not stop working. If you can touch me, my work is done. If you lose me, you must find me with a ring soon after. What am I?

Susannah's breath caught for a moment, and although he was looking down, Eddie knew she was thinking what he was thinking: that was a good one, a damned good one, maybe-

Blaine: (still without hesitation) THE HUMAN HEART. THIS RIDDLE IS BASED IN LARGE PART UPON HUMAN POETIC CONCEITS; SEE FOR INSTANCE JOHN AVERY, SIRONIA HUNTZ, ONDOLA, WILLIAM BLAKE, JAMES TATE, VERONICA MAYS, AND OTHERS. IT IS REMARKABLE HOW HUMAN BEINGS PITCH THEIR MINDS ON LOVE. YET IT IS CONSTANT FROM ONE LEVEL OF THE TOWER TO THE NEXT, EVEN IN THESE DEGENERATE DAYS. CONTINUE, ROLAND OF GILEAD.”
― Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

“Blaine: ONE MOMENT. I MUST ADJUST THE VOLUME FOR YOU TO ENJOY THE FULL EFFECT.
There was a brief, whispery hooting sound (a kind of mechanical throat-clearing) and then they were assaulted by a vast roar. It was water (a billion gallons a minute, for all Jake knew) pouring over the lip of the chasm and falling perhaps two thousand feet into the deep stone basin at the base of the falls. Streamers of mist floated past the blunt almost-faces of the jutting dogs like steam from the vents of hell. The level of sound kept climbing. Now Jake's whole head vibrated with it, and as he clapped his hands over his ears, he saw Roland, Eddie, and Susannah doing the same. Oy was barking, but Jake couldn't hear him. Susannah's lips were moving again, and again he could read the words (STOP IT, BLAINE, STOP IT!) but he couldn't hear them any more than he could hear Oy's barks, although he was sure Susannah was screaming at the top of her lungs.
And still Blaine increased the sound of the waterfall, until Jake could feel his eyes shaking in their sockets and he was sure his ears were going to short out like overstressed stereo speakers.
Then it was over. They still hung above the moon-misty drop, the moonbows still made their slow and dreamlike revolutions before the curtain of endlessly falling water, the wet and brutal stone faces of the dog-guardians continued to jut out of the torrent, but that world-ending thunder was gone.
For a moment Jake thought what he'd feared had happened, that he had gone deaf. Then he realized that he could hear Oy, still barking, and Susannah crying. At first these sounds seemed distant and flat, as if his ears had been packed with cracker-crumbs, but then they began to clarify.
Eddie put his arm around Susannah's shoulders and looked toward the route map.
Eddie: Nice guy, Blaine.
Blaine: (his booming voice sounds laughing and injured simultaneously) I MERELY THOUGHT YOU WOULD ENJOY HEARING THE SOUND OF THE FALLS AT FULL VOLUME. I THOUGHT IT MIGHT HELP YOU TO FORGET MY REGRETTABLE MISTAKE IN THE MATTER OF EDITH BUNKER.
My fault, Jake thought. Blaine may just be a machine, and a suicidal one at that, but he still doesn't like to be laughed at.
He sat beside Susannah and put his own arm around her. He could still hear the Falls of the Hounds, but the sound was now distant.”
― Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

“Blaine: I HAVE A NUMBER OF SWITCHING FUNCTIONS TO PERFORM. THESE WILL TAKE ABOUT FORTY MINUTES AND ARE LARGELY AUTOMATIC. WHILE THIS SWITCHOVER TAKES PLACE AND THE ACCOMPANYING CHECKLIST IS RUNNING, WE SHALL CONTINUE OUR CONTEST. I AM ENJOYING IT VERY MUCH.
Eddie: (still sounding as if he isn't quite with them) It's like when you have to switch over from electric to diesel on the train to Boston. At Hartford or New Haven or one of those other places where no one in their right fucking mind would want to live.
Susannah: Eddie? What are you--?
Roland touches Susannah's shoulder and shakes his head.
Blaine: (in his expansive gosh-but-this-is-fun voice) NEVER MIND EDDIE OF NEW YORK.
Eddie: That's right. Never mind Eddie of New York.
Blaine: HE KNOWS NO GOOD RIDDLES. BUT YOU KNOW MANY, ROLAND OF GILEAD. TRY ME WITH ANOTHER.”
― Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

“Susannah looked over at Eddie and felt a passing ripple of irritation. He seemed to have lost interest in the whole thing--had "zoned out," in his weird 1980s slang. She thought to throw an elbow into his side, wake him up a little, then remembered Roland shaking his head at her and didn't. You wouldn't know he was thinking, not from that slack expression on his face, but maybe he was. If so, you better hurry it up a little, precious, she thought.”
― Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

“Eddie: Blaine?
Blaine: YES, EDDIE OF NEW YORK.
Eddie: I have a couple of riddles. Just to pass the time, you understand.
Blaine: SPEAK, EDDIE OF NEW YORK.”
― Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

“Eddie: What has four wheels and flies?
Blaine: (disapproving) THE TOWN GARBAGE WAGON, AS I HAVE ALREADY SAID. ARE YOU SO STUPID OR INATTENTIVE THAT YOU DO NOT REMEMBER? IT WAS THE FIRST RIDDLE YOU ASKED ME.
Eddie: (in his mind) Yes. And what we all missed--because we were fixated on stumping you with some brain-buster out of Roland's past or Jake's book--is that the contest almost ended right there. (to Blaine) You didn't like that one, did you, Blaine?
Blaine: (agreeably) I FOUND IT EXCEEDINGLY STUPID. PERHAPS THAT'S WHY YOU ASKED IT AGAIN. LIKE CALLS TO LIKE, EDDIE OF NEW YORK, IS IT NOT SO?
Eddie: (smiling and shaking his finger) Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Or, as we used to say back in the neighborhood, 'You can rank me to the dogs and back, but I'll never lose the hard-on I use to fuck your mother.'
Jake: Hurry up! If you can do something, DO IT!
Eddie: It doesn't like silly questions. It doesn't like silly games. And we KNEW that. We knew it from Charlie the Choo-Choo. How stupid can you get? Hell, THAT was the book with the answers, not Riddle-De-Dum, but we never saw it. (to Blaine) Blaine: when is a door not a door?
Blaine: (clicking his tongue) WHEN IT'S AJAR, OF COURSE. WOULD YOU DIE WITH SUCH STUPID RIDDLES IN YOUR MOUTH?”
― Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

“Eddie: Quite your whining, pal. If you want privilege of smearing us all over the landscape, you'll just have to put up with a few riddles that aren't quite up to your standards of logic.
Blaine: YOU MUST NOT SPEAK TO ME IN SUCH A MANNER.
Eddie: Or what? You'll kill me? Don't make me laugh. Just play. You agreed to the game; now play it.”
― Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

“Your goose is cooked, Blaine, and your turkey's baked. Happy fuckin Thanksgiving.”
― Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

“Eddie: Holy shit. Are we back home? If we are, where are all the people? And if something like Blaine has been stopping off in Topeka--OUR Topeka, Topeka, Kansas--how come I haven't seen anything about it on Sixty Minutes?
Susannah: What's Sixty Minutes?
Eddie: TV show. You missed it by five or ten years. Old white guys in ties. Doesn't matter.”
― Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

“Say, kiddies! Today we're studying Wacky Geography in Mid-World. You see, boys and girls, in Mid-World you start in New York, travel southeast to Kansas, and then continue along the Path of the Beam until you come to the Dark Tower...which happens to be smack in the middle of everything. First, fight the giant lobsters! Next, ride the psychotic train! And then, after a visit to our snack bar for a popkin or two...”
― Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

“Susannah: This place...it may or may not be Topeka, but what it really looks like to me is one of those creepy little towns on The Twilight Zone. You boys probably don't remember that one, but--
Eddie and Jake: (in perfect unison) Yes, I do. (laughter)
Jake: They still show the reruns.
Eddie: Yeah, all the time. Usually sponsored by bankruptcy lawyers who look like shorthair terriers.”
― Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

“Bally, Gucci, eat your heart out. This is great stuff.”
― Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

“Eddie: (standing and smiling into an invisible camera) When I'm travelling through the Land of Oz in my new Takuro Spirit, I drink Nozz-A-La! It fills me up but never fills me out! It makes me happy to be a man! It makes me know God! It gives me the outlook of an angel and the balls of a tiger! When I drink Nozz-A-La, I say 'Gosh! Ain't I glad to be alive!' I say--
Jake: (laughter) Sit down, you bumhug!”
― Stephen King, Wizard and Glass

“What he had loved most about carving was the SEEING part, which happened even before you began. Sometimes you saw a car or a truck. Sometimes a dog or cat. Once, he remembered, it had been the face of an idol--one of the spooky Easter Island monoliths he had seen in an issue of National Geographic at school. That had turned out to be a good one. The game was to find out how much of that thing you could get out of the wood without breaking it. You could never get it all, but if you were very careful, you could sometimes get quite a lot.”
― Stephen King, The Waste Lands

“Henry had taught Eddie how to play basketball in the playground near the apartment building where they lived--this was in a cement suburb where the towers of Manhattan stood against the horizon like a dream and the welfare check was king. Eddie was eight years younger than Henry and much smaller, but he was also much faster. He had a natural feel for the game; once he got on the cracked, hilly cement of the court with the ball in his hands, the moves seemed to sizzle in his nerve-endings. He was faster, but that was no big deal. The big deal was this: he was BETTER than Henry. If he hadn't known it from the results of the pick-up games in which they sometimes played, he would have known it from Henry's thunderous looks and the hard punches to the upper arm Henry often dealt out on their way home afterwards. These punches were supposedly Henry's little jokes--"Two for flinching!" Henry would cry cheerily, and then whap-whap into Eddie's bicep with one knuckle extended--but they didn't FEEL like jokes. They felt like warnings. They felt like Henry's way of saying You better not fake me out and make me look stupid when you drive for the basket; you better remember that I'm Watching Out for You.
The same was true with reading...baseball...Ring-a-Levio...math...even jump-rope, which was a girl's game. That he was better at these tings, or COULD be better, was a secret that had to be kept at all costs. Because Eddie was the younger brother. Because Henry was Watching Out for him. But the most important part of the underneath reason was also the simplest: these things had to be kept secret because Henry was Eddie's big brother, and Eddie adored him.”
― Stephen King, The Waste Lands

“I called it a robot," Eddie answered, "but that's not what it really was. Susannah's right--the only thing robots bleed when you shoot them is Quaker State 10-40. I think it was what people of my world call a cyborg, Roland--a creature that's part machine and part flesh and blood. There was a movie I saw...we told you about movies, didn't we?"
Smiling a little, Roland nodded.
"Well, this movie was called Robocop, and the guy in it wasn't a lot different from the bear Susannah killed. How did you know where she should shoot it?”
― Stephen King, The Waste Lands

“Worlds don't GROW, Roland."
"Don't they? When I was a boy, Eddie, there were maps. I remember one in particular. It was called the Greater Kingdoms of the Western Earth. It showed my land, which was called by the name Gilead. It showed the Downland Baronies, which were overrun by riot and civil war in the year after I won my guns, and the hills, and the desert, and the mountains, and the Western Sea. It was a long distance from Gilead to the Western Sea--a thousand miles or more--but it had taken me over twenty years to cross that distance."
"That's impossible," Susannah said quickly, fearfully. "Even if you WALKED the whole distance it couldn't take twenty years."
"Well, you have to allow for stops to write postcards and drink beer," Eddie said, but they both ignored him.
"I didn't walk but rode most of the distance on horseback," Roland said. "I was--slowed up, shall we say?--every now and then, but for most of that time I was moving. Moving away from John Farson, who led the revolt which toppled the world I grew up in and who wanted my head on a pole in his courtyard--he had good reason to want that, I suppose, since I and my compatriots were responsible for the deaths of a great many of his followers--and because I stole something he held very dear."
"What, Roland?" Eddie asked curiously.
Roland shook his head. "That's a story for another day...or maybe never. For now, think not of that but of this: I've come MANY thousands of miles. Because the world is growing."
"A thing like that just can't happen," Eddie reiterated, but he was badly shaken, all the same. "There'd be earthquakes...floods...tidal waves...I don't know what all..."
"LOOK!" Roland said furiously. "Just look around you! What do you see? A world that is slowing down like a child's top even as it speeds up and moves on in some other way none of us understand. Look at your kills, Eddie! Look at your kills, for your father's sake!”
― Stephen King, The Waste Lands

“The idea that he was standing by a deserted road in an almost empty world, standing some one hundred and seventy miles from a city which had been built by some fabulous lost civilization and listening to a rock-and-roll drum-line...that was crazy, but was it any crazier than a traffic-light that dinged and dropped a rusty green flag with the word GO printed on it? Any crazier than discovering the wreck of a German plane from the 1930s?”
― Stephen King, The Waste Lands

“The banks on either side had grown steadily steeper, and now, at their tops, they could see slim, pointed shapes looming against the sky. Roland thought of arrowheads--huge ones, weapons made by a tribe of giants. To his companions, they looked like rockets or guided missiles. Susannah thought of Redstones fired from Cape Canaveral; Eddie thought about SAMs, some built to be fired from the backs of flatbed trucks, stored all over Europe; Jake thought of ICBMs hiding in reinforced concrete silos under the plains of Kansas and the unpopulated mountains of Nevada, programmed to hit back at China or the USSR in the event of nuclear armageddon. All of them felt as if they had passed into a dark and woeful zone of shadow, or into a countryside laboring under some old but still powerful curse.”
― Stephen King, The Waste Lands

“Come on, you deucies!" a relatively young man snarled. He wore his blue scarf around his throat like a rally-racer's ascot. He was bald except for two fluffs of frizzy red hair, one on each side of his head. To Susannah, this fellow looked like Clarabell the Clown; to Eddie he looked like Ronald McDonald; to both of them he looked like trouble.”
― Stephen King, The Waste Lands

“Eddie: (into the speaker, in a plummy and completely bogus British accent) Hullo, Blaine! Cheerio, old fellow! This is Robin Leach, host of Lifestyles of the Rich and Brainless, here to tell you that YOU have won six billion dollars and a new Ford Escort in the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes!
Susannah: Eddie, stop it! STOP IT!
Eddie: (smiling, eyes glittering with a mixture of fear, hysteria, and frustrated anger) You and your monorail girlfriend, Patricia, will spend a lux-yoo-rious month in scenic Jimtown, where you'll drink only the finest wine and eat only the finest virgins! You--
Little Blaine: ...shhhh...
Eddie: Suze? Did you--
Little Blaine: ...shhh...don't wake him up.
Eddie: What...What are you? Who are you?
Little Blaine: I'm Little Blaine. The one he doesn't see.”
― Stephen King, The Waste Lands