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
Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that enemies are more likely to tell the truth, while friends and lovers often hide the truth due to obligations.
In this quote, Stephen King highlights the complexity of interpersonal relationships, where the expectations of loyalty and duty can lead individuals to obscure the truth. Friends and lovers may lie to protect feelings or maintain harmony, while enemies, by contrast, have less to lose and often express unfiltered truths, revealing the paradox of honesty within close relationships.
In practice
This quote can be used when discussing the nature of honesty in relationships during a casual conversation.
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.
Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.
Hairstyles change, and skirt lengths, and slang, but high school administrations? Never.
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
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.
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.
Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.
What our grandmothers told us about playing hard to get is true. The whole point of the game is to impress and capture. It's not about honesty. Many men and women, when they're playing the courtship game, deceive so they can win. Novelty, excitement and danger drive up dopamine in the brain. And both sexes brag.
We invented marriage. Couples invented marriage. We also invented divorce,mind you. And we invented infidelity,too, as well as romantic misery. In fact we invented the whole sloppy mess of love and intimacy and aversion and euphoria and failure. But most importantly of all, most subversively of all, most stubbornly of all, we invented privacy.
Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and the sea is not within sight; that in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.
I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.
Can anyone understand how it is to have lived in the White House and then, suddenly, to be living alone as the President's widow?
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