Stephen King

Carrie's mother: "I can see your dirty pillows. Everyone will. They'll be looking at your body. The Books says-" Carrie: "Those are my breasts, Momma. Every woman has them".

Yet although she had swum and she had laughed when they ducked her (until she couldn't get her head up any more and they kept doing it and she got panicky and began to scream) and had tried to take part in the camp's activities, a thousand practical jokes had been played on ol' prayin' Carrie and she had come home on the bus a week early, her eyes red and socketed from weeping, to be picked up by Momma at the station, and Momma had told her grimly that she should treasure the memory of her scourging as proof that Momma knew, that Momma was right, that the only hope of safety and salvation was inside the red circle. 'For straight is the gate', Momma said grimly in the taxi and at home she had sent Carrie to the closet for six hours.

Unfortunately, Ewen is staffed completely by men in its administration wing. I don't believe they have any real conception of how utterly nasty what you did was.

She hated her face, her dull, stupid, bovine face, the vapid eyes, the red, shiny pimples, the nests of blackheads. She hated her face most of all. The reflection was suddenly split by a jagged, silvery crack. The mirror fell on the floor and shattered at her feet, leaving only the plastic ring to stare at her like a blinded eye.

Carrie stood among them stolidly, a frog among swans. She was a chunky girl with pimples on her neck and back and buttocks, her wet hair completely without color. [...] She wished forlornly and constantly that Ewan High had individual - and thus private - showers like the ones at Andover or Boxford. They stared. They always stared.

God had turned His face away and why not? This horror was as much His doing as hers.

The word that [Sue] was avoiding was expressed To Conform in the infinitive, and it conjured up miserable images of hair in rollers, long afternoons in front of the ironing board in front of the soap operas, while hubby was off busting heavies in an anonymous Office...

She had bought a special brassiere to go with it, which gave her breasts the proper uplift (not that they actually needed it) but left their top halves uncovered.

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

You must never draw until you know how many are against you, or you've satisfied yourself that you can never know, or you've decided it's your day to die.

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

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