Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it.
Stephen KingRead
People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the complexity of human nature, suggesting that one can appear strange while still harboring innocence and vulnerability.
In this quote, Stephen King uses a metaphor about having the heart of a small boy residing in a glass jar to illustrate the idea that beneath an exterior that may seem peculiar or odd, there lies a core of innocence and sensitivity. It emphasizes that people's assumptions about others can often misrepresent their true selves, revealing deeper emotional truths that are not immediately visible.
Themes
StrangeHeartInnocenceVulnerabilityPerception
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about mental health, to highlight how people often misjudge others based on appearances.
More from Stephen King
All quotes →Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.
Stephen KingRead
Hairstyles change, and skirt lengths, and slang, but high school administrations? Never.
Stephen KingRead
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
Stephen KingRead
That's the day's business. Thinking. Thinking and isolation, because it doesn't matter if you pass the time of day with someone or not; in the end, you're alone. He seemed to have put in as many miles in his brain as he had with his feet. The thoughts kept coming and there was no way to deny them.
Stephen KingRead
Late last night and the night before, tommyknockers, tommyknockers knocking on my door. I wanna go out, don't know if I can 'cuz I'm so afraid of the tommyknocker man.
Stephen KingRead
Similar quotes
Represent to yourself a dark city all burning and stinking with fire and brimstone. The damned are in the depth of hell within this woful city, where they suffer unspeakable torments in all their senses and members. Consider above all the eternity of their pains, which above all things makes hell intolerable.
Saint Francis De SalesRead
Perhaps the real point of life is simply to wear us down until we have no choice but to start abandoning our defenses. We learn that the way things are is simply the way they are meant to be right now, and then, suddenly, at long last, we catch a glimpse of the abundance in the moment--abundance even in the face of things falling apart.
Katrina KenisonRead
A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.
Nathaniel HawthorneRead
Sometimes there is a difference in what is legal and what ought to be done.
William J. ClintonRead
Understand that the body is merely the foam of a wave, the shadow of a shadow.
Gautama BuddhaRead
This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.
Christopher AlexanderRead