Doctor Sleep

Review

Notes

p57 - There came a time when you realized that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went. See Hemingway quote, [[The Sun Also Rises]].

p139 - (The first description of Dan in his role as Doctor Sleep and what that looks/feels like for him.)

p143 - He wasn’t as close to the surface anymore, but he was still there and still the same ugly, irrational sonofabitch he’d always been.

p144 - God knew he didn’t want to be his father, whose bouts of sobriety had been the white-knuckle kind. AA was supposed to help with anger, and mostly it did, but there were times like tonight when Dan realized what a flimsy barrier it was. Times when he felt worthless, and the booze seemed like all he deserved. At times like that he felt very close to his father.

p193 - How much of his father’s son was he? In how many ways?

p300 - “There are other worlds than these.” See ‘The Gunslinger’ pg 222.

p301 - “My father tried,” he said. “That’s the best I can say for him. The most malevolent spirits in his life came in bottles. If he’d tried AA, things might have been a lot different. But he didn’t. I don’t think my mother even knew there was such a thing, or she would have suggested he give it a shot. By the time we went up to the Overlook Hotel, where a friend of his got him a job as the winter caretaker, his picture could have been next to dry drunk in the dictionary.”

p471 - That in turn made him think of some poem or other, one about how you could spend years running, but in the end you always wound up facing yourself in a hotel room, with a naked bulb hanging overhead and a revolver on the table.

p473 - “But you loved him, I guess.” ¶ “I did.” Still looking at that shambling, rundown apartment house. Not much, but Dan couldn’t help wondering how different their lives might have been if they had stayed there. If the Overlook had not ensnared them. “He was good and bad and I loved both sides of him. God help me, I guess I still do.”

p498 - He stood with his legs apart, his head lowered, his shoulders hunched, and his fisted hands raised—the posture of every man who had ever lost his mind in a killing rage.

p499 - MY FATHER KNEW NOTHING!

p508 - He was not entirely surprised to see a man standing on the platform by the broken rail. He raised one hand, the summit of Pawnee Mountain visible through it, and sketched a flying kiss that Dan remembered from his childhood. He remembered it well. It had been their special end-of-the-day thing.

p511 - FEAR stands for face everything and recover. —Old AA Saying

p513 - Life was a wheel, its only job was to turn, and it always came back to where it had started. Ka is a wheel.

p516 - “You know what it says in the Promises? About how we’ll learn not to regret the past, or wish to shut the door on it? Pardon me for saying so, but I think that’s one item of bullshit in a program full of true things. I regret plenty, but it’s time to open the door, little as I want to.”

p518 - “Everything’s smaller when it’s out.”

p523 - “So why do I dream about it? Why do I wish I could take it back? She would have killed us, so why do I wish I could take it back?”