The Dark Tower (series)

The Dark Tower is a series of seven books by American writer Stephen King that tells the tale of lead character Roland Deschain's quest for the "Dark Tower." Part of Roland's fictional quest lies in discovering the true nature of the Tower. The series incorporates themes from multiple genres, including fantasy fiction, science fantasy, horror, and western elements.

Vol I: The Gunslinger

• The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
  • Opening text

• Go then, there are other worlds than these.
  • Jake

• I don't like people, they fuck me up.

• The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what looked like eternity in all directions. It was white and blinding and waterless and without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon and the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death. An occasional tombstone sign pointed the way, for once the drifted track that cut its way through the thick crust of alkali had been a highway. Coaches and buckas had followed it. The world had moved on since then. The world had emptied.

• hollow grandeur in place of true passions which might once have built kingdoms and sustained them.
  • Rolands musings on the social state of his lost civilisation.

• The Tower. Somewhere ahead, it waited for him - the nexus of Time, the nexus of Size.

• “Let the word and the legend go before you. There are those who will carry both.” His eyes flicked over the gunslinger’s shoulder. “Fools, perchance. Let the world go before you. Let your shadow grow. Let it grow hair on its face. Let it become dark.” He smiled grotesquely. “Given time, words may even enchant an enchanter. Do you take my meaning, gunslinger?”
  • Cort, to Roland after being defeated by him

• The gunslinger waited for the time of the drawing and dreamed his long dreams of the Dark Tower, to which he would someday come at dusk and approach, winding his horn, to do some unimaginable final battle.

• "Beyond the reach of human range, a drop of hell, a touch of strange"
  • Cort's saying on the effects of mescaline.

• It was a blade of grass. But it was purple.

• "Only enemies speak the truth. Friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty." -Walter O'Dim

• Shaken and alone, enwrapt in the darkness, terrified of an ultimate meaning rushing at him, he gathered himself and uttered the final answer on that subject: “NEVER!”

  “THEN LET THERE BE LIGHT!” And there was light, crashing in on him like a hammer, a great and primordial light.

• The World has moved on

• Perhaps they only looked for a Jesus to heal them, raise them Lazarus-like from the darkness.
  • Roland, on the Slow Mutants.

Vol II: The Drawing of the Three

• Had he come this far just to die, then? He would not. And if he were to die in spite of his determination, he would die on his way to the Tower.
  • The Gunslinger

• The door had hinges, but they were fastened to nothing – or so it seems, the gunslinger thought. This is a mystery, a most marvelous mystery, but does it really matter? You are dying. Your own mystery – the only one that really matters to any man or woman in the end – approaches.
  • The Gunslinger

• When the only fast way you could get rid of the monkey on your back was to snap your spinal cord above that bunch of nerves, you were dealing with one heavy monkey.
  • Eddie Dean

• As Henry Dean, the great sage and eminent junkie would have put it, Flip-flop, hippety-hop, offa your rocker and over the top, life’s a fiction and the world’s a lie, so put on some Creedence and let’s get high.
  • Eddie Dean

• "Good. Call it fluttergork if you want, pr... Eddie. Just do it"
  • Roland

• "Jesus Christ, when these DO shoot, they really blow holes in things".
  • Eddie Dean after firing Rolands gun in Balazar's office.

• “Who are you?” Eddie screams at him.
  “Your destiny, Eddie,” the gunslinger whispers.

• There are people who need people to need them. The reason you don’t understand is because you’re not one of those people. You’d use me and then toss me away like a paper bag if that’s what it came down to. God fucked you, my friend. You’re just smart enough so it would hurt you to do that, and just hard enough so you’d go ahead and do it anyway. You wouldn’t be able to help yourself. If I was lying on the beach there and screaming for help, you’d walk over me as if I was between you and your goddamn Tower.
  • Eddie

• You’re a Tower Junkie, Roland.
  • Eddie

• Fault always lies in the same place, my fine babies: with him weak enough to lay blame.
  • Cort

• In a world that was clearly going to hell head-first, what was so low about getting high?
  • Henry Dean

• "God pisses down the back of your neck every day but only drowns you once".
  • Henry Dean

• “Won’t somebody please explain where I am and how I got here?” the woman in the wheelchair asked – almost pleaded.
  “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, Dorothy,” Eddie said. “You ain’t in Kansas anymore.”

• If you have given up your heart for the Tower, Roland, you have already lost. A heartless creature is a loveless creature, and a loveless creature is a beast. To be a beast is perhaps bearable, although the man who has become one will surely pay hell’s own price in the end, but if you should gain your object? What if you should, heartless, storm the Dark Tower and win it? What could you do except degenerate from beast to monster? To gain one’s object as a beast would only be bitterly comic, like giving a magnifying glass to an elephaunt. But to gain one’s object as a monster…To pay hell is one thing. But do you want to own it?

• “Well,” Eddie said, “What was behind Door Number One wasn’t so hot, and what was behind Door Number Two was even worse, so now, instead of quitting like sane people, we’re going to go right ahead and check out Door Number Three. The way things have been going, I think it’s likely to be something like Godzilla or Ghidra the Three-Headed Monster, but I’m an optimist. I’m still hoping for the stainless steel cookware.”

• "If we were going to rape you, you would be one well-raped woman by now"
  • Roland to Detta Walker

• “I love you, Eddie. You have tried so hard. Been so patient. So has he - ” she nodded toward the place where the gunslinger lay propped against the rocks, watching. “– but he is a hard man to love.”
  • Odetta Holmes

• Later, with strange galaxies turning in slow gavotte overhead, neither thought the act of love had ever been so sweet, so full.

• Control the things you can control, maggot. Let everything else take a flying fuck at you, and if you must go down, go down with your guns blazing.
  • Cort

• The thunder of his own guns filled him with stupid wonder.
  • Roland

• I am three women…I who was; I who had no right to be but was; I am the woman you have saved. I thank you gunslinger.
  • Susannah

• By Profession, He was a Sucessful C.P.A. Pushing was only his Hobby.
  • - Of Jack Mort

• When it came to murder, Jack Mort was an equal-opportunity employer.
  • - Of Jack Mort

• Who was to say he had not sculpted the cosmos today, or might not at some future time? God, no wonder he creamed his jeans!
  • - Of Jack Mort

• There ensued a short, violent struggle. The Gunslinger won, but it was a surprisingly hard go. In his way, Jack Mort was as divided as Odetta. He was not a schizophrenic as she was; he knew well enough what he did from time to time. But he kept his secret self - the part of him that was The Pusher - as carefully

locked away as an embezzler might lock away his secret skim.

• • - Of Jack Mort

• Do-Bees covered all the bases.

• Yet somehow they still found a way to shrink back from the man in the Blue suit who came plunging down the stairs. It wasn't much wonder. He was holding a gun,

and another was strapped around his waist.
Also, He appeared to be on fire.

• • - Of Jack Mort/Roland

• Jack Mort died alone.

Vol III: The Waste Lands

• I do not aim with my hand;
  He who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.
  I aim with my eye.

  I do not shoot with my hand;
  He who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.
  I shoot with my mind.

  I do not kill with my gun;
  He who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father.
  I kill with my heart.

• Choo-Choo, thought Jake, and shuddered.

• Blaine is a pain, and that is the truth.

  Yet his heart, that silent, watchful, lifelong prisoner of Ka, received the words of this promise not just with wonder but with doubt.

• See the TURTLE, ain't he keen? All things serve the fucking Beam!
  • Eddie Dean

• TOUGH TITTY, SAID THE KITTY.
  • Blaine the Mono

• The gunslinger let me drop, and that is the truth; I still love him, and that is the truth
  • Jake's essay, My Understanding of Truth

• 'At this nexus lies the Great Portal that so-called Thirteenth Gate which rules not just this world but all worlds.'
  • Roland, explaining the layout and path to the Dark Tower

• "All is silent in the halls of the dead."Eddie heard himself in a falling, fainting voice. "All is forgotten in the stone halls of th dead. Behold the stairways which stand in darkness; behold the rooms of ruin. These are the halls of the dead where spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one."
  • Eddie Dean

• Dad-a-chum,dud-a-chee,not to worry, you've got the key.

• "Shake the hand that shook the world."
  • Randal Flagg/Walter O'Dim

Vol IV: Wizard and Glass

• SEE YOU LATER ALLIGATOR AFTER A WHILE CROCODILE DON'T FORGET TO WRITE.
  • Blaine the Mono

• "WHAT DOES THAT SIGNIFY, FOOLISH CREATURE?"
  "It's the world's smallest violin, playing 'My Heart Pumps Purple Piss for You.'"
  • Blaine the Mono and Eddie Dean

• Why did the dead baby cross the road? ... Because it was stapled to the chicken, you dopey fuck!
  • Eddie, to Blaine the Mono.

• Ka like the wind
  • Susan Delgado

• Time is a face on the water

• It seemed to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended.

• If you love me, then love me

• "Might I recline briefly at your feet miss? Your beauty has loosened my knees. I am sure a few moments looking up at your profile from below with the back of my head on these cool tiles will put me right."
  • Cuthbert Allgood

• True love, like any other strong and addicting drug, is boring -- once the tale of encounter and discovery is told, kisses quickly grow stale and caresses tiresome... except, of course, to those who share the kisses, who give and take the caresses while every sound and color of the world seems to deepen and brighten around them. As with any other strong drug, true first love is really only interesting to those who have become its prisoners.

• ROLAND! I LOVE THEE!
  • Susan Delgado. Last words.

• There is no word, not even "No", in his screams at the end. He [Roland] howls like a gutted animal, his hands fused to the ball...Alain cannot pry his hands away from the ball, so instead he lays his hand on his cheek, touching him that way. Except there's nothing left to touch. Nothing left...and the thing that rides West with Cuthbert and Alain...will not be Roland, or even the Ghost of Roland. Like the moon at the end of its cycle, Roland is gone."

• "The scariest, most terrifying thing that I fear?"
  "Yes."
  "My Imagination."
  "I thought you were going to say "Fear, itself."
  "Then you have a small imagination."
  • Roland and Eddie

• Oh, Christ. I left the world I knew to watch a kid try to put booties on a fucked-up weasel. Shoot me, Roland, before I breed.
  • Eddie Dean

• Because often, silence is best.
  • Roland

• I have no opinion. 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.
  • Cuthbert Allgood

• Fools are the only folk on the earth who can absolutely count on getting what they deserve.

• The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window.

• Above them, Demon Moon grinned and winked one eye through what appeared to be a shifting scrim of blood

Vol V: Wolves of the Calla

• "Do'ee say the world will end in fire or in ice, gunslinger?" Roland considered this. "Neither",he said at last. "I think in darkness"

• Near them, stuck on the branch of a tree, had been a note from the being Roland had just missed killing in Palace: 'Renounce the Tower. This is your last warning.' Ridiculous, really. Roland would no more renounce the Tower than he'd kill Jake's pet billy-bumbler and then roast him on a spit for dinner. None of them would renounce Roland's Dark Tower. God help them, they were in it all the way to the end.

• And really, what could be so special about the number nineteen? Mystery Number, indeed.
  • Eddie

• No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves.
  • Roland

• Do people in your world always want only one story flavor at a time? Only one taste in their mouths?
  • Roland

• The whole world was losing its shit, going nineteen.
  • Jake

• Who's this Claudia y Inez Bachman?
  • Eddie

• Now there was a fourth woman. She had been born out of the third in yet another time of stress and change. She cared nothing for Odetta, Detta, or Susannah; she cared for nothing save the new chap who was on his way. The new chap needed to be fed. The banqueting hall was near. That was what mattered and all that mattered.

  This new woman, every bit as dangerous in her own way as Detta Walker had been, was Mia. She bore the name of no man's father, only the word that in the High Speech means mother.

• Here comes Mia, daughter of none!

• Your imagination is a poor thing, Roland.
  • Vannay

• Dreaming. But not just dreaming. This was todash, the passing between two worlds. Supposedly the Manni could do it. And supposedly some pieces of the Wizard's Rainbow could make you do it, whether you wanted to or not. One piece of it in particular.

  "They could get caught between and fall", Roland thought. "Vannay said that, too. He said that going todash was full of peril."

• "Water if God wills it", he reminded himself. "About the great matters, Roland, you have no say".
  Not a comfortable truth, especially for a man on a quest such as his, but one he's learned to live with.

• Time is a face on the water.
  Roland felt gooseflesh run up his arms. Somewhere - perhaps in a glaring, blood-colored field of roses still far from here - a rustie had just walked over his grave.

• "You said there were other worlds than these," Roland said, "and there are. New York in all its multiple whens is only one of many. That we are drawn there again and again has to do with the rose. I have no doubt of that, nor do I doubt that in some way I do not understand the rose is the Dark Tower. Either that or-"

  "Or it's another door," Susannah murmured. "One that opens on the Dark Tower itself."

• Because of changes in time - a softening of time which I know you all have felt - I've quested after the Dark Tower for over a thousand years, sometimes skipping over whole generations the way a sea-bird may cruise from one wave-top to the next, only wetting its feet in the foam. Never in all this time did I come across one of these doors between the worlds until I came to the ones on the beach at the edge of the Western Sea. I had an idea what they were, although I could have told you something of todash and the bends o' the rainbow.
  • Roland

• "Do you know you come to the line of Eld?" Roland asked in that same curiously gentle voice. He stretched a hand towards Eddie, Susannah, and Jake. Even toward Oy. "For these are mine, sure. As I am theirs. We are round, and roll as we do. And you know what we are."

  "Are you?" Callahan asked. "Are you all?"

• Eddie had known who they were since River Crossing, when the old people had knelt in the street to Roland. Hell, he'd known since the woods (what he still thought of as Shardik's woods), where Roland had taught them to aim with the eye, shoot with the mind, kill with the heart. Not three, not four. One. That Roland should finish them so, complete them so, was horrible. He was filled with poison and had kissed them with his poisoned lips. He had made them gunslingers, and had Eddie really thought there was no work left for the line of Arthur Eld in the mostly empty and husked-out world? That they would simply be allowed to toddle along the Path of the Beam until they got to Roland's Dark Tower and fixed whatever was wrong there? Well, guess again.
  • Eddie

• We deal in lead.
  • Roland

• Three is a number of power.
  • Roland

• I have an object of great power.
  • Callahan

• We're bound to do as you ask, if we judge your Calla in the White and those you call Wolves as agents of the outer dark: Beam-breakers, if you ken.
  • Roland

• A tear spilled down Callahan's right cheek, then another. He wiped them away absently. "I've never dared handle it, but I've seen it. Felt its power. Christ the Man Jesus help me, I have Black Thirteen under the floorboards of my church. And it's come alive. Do you understand me?" He looked at them with his wet eyes. "It's come alive."

• There was a part of her - a spiteful Detta Walker part - that would always resent Roland's ascendancy in her heart and mind, but for the most part she recognized him for what he was: the last of his kind. Maybe even a hero.
  • Susannah

• It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.
  • Susannah

• "Thunderclap," she said in a voice Eddie could barely hear. "None go there."

  "Why?"

  "It's dark there," she said, still not looking up from her lap. Then she raised an arm. This time she pointed in the direction from which Roland and his friends had come. Back toward Mid-World. "There," she said, "the world is ending. Or so we're told. And there..." She pointed east and now raised her face to Eddie's. "There, in Thunderclap, it's already ended. In the middle are we, who only want go our own way in peace."

  • Zalia

• Thankee-sai, long days, kiss my ass and go to heaven.
  • Eddie

• When it came to pulling coals out of a hot fire, he'd put two dollars on Roland of Gilead for every one he put on God and the Man Jesus, those heavenly gunslingers.
  • Eddie, about Callahan

• It's the Way of the Eld. We are of that an-tet, khef and ka, watch and warrant. Gunslingers, do ya.
  • Roland

• When the shooting starts, we kill what moves.
  • Roland

• Roland was as much a prisoner of his rules and traditions as Eddie had ever been of heroin.

• The gunslinger's initial feelings for Eddie had wavered between caution and contempt for what Roland saw as his weakness of character. Respect had come more slowly. It had begun in Balazar's office, when Eddie had faught naked. Very few men Roland had known could have done that. It had grown with his realization of how much Eddie was like Cuthbert. Then, on the mono, Eddie had acted with a kind of desperate creativity that Roland could admire but never equal. Eddie Dean was possessed of Cuthbert Allgood's always puzzling and sometimes annoying sense of ridiculous; he was also possessed Alain John's deep flashes of intuition. Yet in the end, Eddie was like neither of Roland's old friends. He was sometimes weak and self-centered, but possessed of deep reservoirs of courage and courage's good sister, what Eddie himself sometimes called 'heart'.

• First come smiles, then comes lies. Last is gunfire.
  • Roland

• When everything's a surprise, experience takes on a dreamlike quality.

• Definition of a wanderer: a guy who's always looking beyond.
  • Eddie

• All of your lies will cross your eyes.

• 5 minutes of worth of blood and stupidity
  • Roland

• They burst up and out of the earth like dragons teeth

Vol VI: Song of Susannah

• We spread the time as we can, but in the end the world takes it all back.
  • Roland

• Food and palaver don't mix.
  • Roland

• Anger is the most useless emotion; destructive to the mind and hurtful of the heart.
  • Henchick, of the Manni

• I need no sigul. Not the potter but the potter's clay, and I need no sigul!
  • Pere Callahan

• Dad-a-chum, dad-a-chee! Not to worry, you've got the key!
  • Stephen King, found in a note to Jake Chambers

Vol VII: The Dark Tower

• "May you find your Tower, Roland, and breach it, and may you climb to the top!"
  The teeth of his old enemies, these ancient brothers and sisters of a thing which had called itself Kurt Barlow, sank into him like stingers. Callahan felt them not at all. He was smiling as he pulled the trigger and escaped them for good.
  • Pere Callahan's death

• "There'll be guards", Eddie said. "Maybe a lot of them. What if we're outnumbered?"
  "It won't be the first time", Roland said.
  • Before the attack on Algul Siento.

• The bumbler did not bite, but said a single word. "Olan," said he. Then he lowered his head, uttered a single sigh, and died.

• So much you did; So much you did and so much more you would have done, aye, and all without a check or qualm, and so will the world end, I think, a victim of love rather than hate. For love's ever been the more destructive weapon, sure.
  • Roland

• Gunfire makes close relations.
  • Roland

• Sometimes I think we'd all be better off if the people who mean well would just creep away and die.
  • Eddie

• Any statement beginning with the words 'In truth' is almost always a lie.
  • Mordred

• Even if the torture stops, I'll die. And you'll die too, for when love leaves the world, all hearts are still. Tell them of my love and tell them of my pain and tell them of my hope, which still lives. For this is all I have and all I am and all I ask.
  • The Beam

• All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one.

• They were the hands of Gan, the hands of ka, and they knew no mercy.

• You are the grim, goal-oriented ones who will not believe that the joy is in the journey rather than the destination no matter how many times it has been proven to you.
  • Afterword

• The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
  • Ending Text