The Dark Tower. Book 4. Wizard and Glass

He’s using every ounce of his will to keep from going back, anyway, Cuthbert thought. He found the realization comforting—sometimes Roland scared him. There was something in him that went beyond steel. Something like madness. If it was there, you were glad to have it on your side . . . but often enough you wished it wasn’t there at all. On anybody’s side.

Roland had no thought of retreating, or perhaps jigging to one side or the other. He had, in fact, no thoughts at all. The fever had descended over his mind and he burned with it like a torch inside a glass sleeve. Screaming through the reins caught in his teeth, he galloped toward Hash Renfrew and the three men behind him.

She worked against the feeling as best she could, holding onto her mind, refusing to let it turn into what it had been before and would be again if she let it—a brainless bird trapped in a barn, bashing into the walls and ignoring the open window through which it had entered.

“Fine, shoot me,” Roland said. He lifted his head and looked down at Jonas. “Shoot, exile. Shoot, worm. Shoot, you failure. You’ll still live in exile and die as you lived.”

“Who sent you west, maggot?” he asked as he passed Jonas. “Couldn’t have been Cort—you’re too old. Was it his father?”

The look of slightly bored amusement left Jonas’s face—flew from his face, as if slapped away. For one amazing moment the man with the white hair was a child again: shocked, shamed, and hurt.

“Yes, Cort’s da—I see it in your eyes. And now you’re here, on the Clean Sea . . . except you’re really in the west. The soul of a man such as you can never leave the west.”

Men! She could not understand why so many women feared them. Hadn’t the gods made them with the most vulnerable part of their guts hanging right out of their bodies, like a misplaced bit of bowel? Kick them there and they curled up like snails. Caress them there and their brains melted.

he had discovered, as many others had before him, that only the first cussword is really hard; after that, there’s nothing quite like them for relieving one’s feelings.

Jake was munching the single leftover burrito, but probably for the same reason folks climbed Mount Everest . . . because it was there

Then Aunt Cord had smiled. A real smile. What hurt Susan the most, confused her the most, was that her aunt was no cradle-story ogre, no witch like Rhea of the Cöos. There was no monster here, only a maiden lady with some few social pretensions, a love of gold and silver, and a fear of being turned out, penniless, into the world.

“I have no opinion,” Cuthbert said brightly. “No, none at all. Opinion is politics, and politics is an evil which has caused many a fellow to be hung while he’s still young and pretty.”