It, by Stephen King, is a novel about a shape-shifter that lives on children’s fears.
One of IT’s disguises is a scary clown named Pennywise.
IT first appeared in Derry, Maine. In 1957, a young boy named George was killed in a storm drain.
George’s older brother Bill and his friends, known as “The Loser’s Club,” are each terrorized by IT preying on their deepest fears.
They are also terrorized by a bully named Henry Bowers, who it enlists.
“The Loser’s Club” defeats IT and frames Henry for IT’s murders. But IT returned in 1984-85, and the adults must defeat IT and Henry once for good.
It Quotes With Page Numbers
“The terror, which would not end for another 28 years-if it ever did end-began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 3
“Want your boat, Georgie?’ Pennywise asked. ‘I only repeat myself because you really do not seem that eager.’ He held it up, smiling. He was wearing a baggy silk suit with great big orange buttons. A bright tie, electric-blue, flopped down his front, and on his hands were big white gloves, like the kind Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck always wore.
Yes, sure,’ George said, looking into the stormdrain.
And a balloon? I’ve got red and green and yellow and blue…’
Do they float?’
Float?’ The clown’s grin widened. ‘Oh yes, indeed they do. They float! And there’s cotton candy…’
George reached.
The clown seized his arm.
And George saw the clown’s face change.
What he saw then was terrible enough to make his worst imaginings of the thing in the cellar look like sweet dreams; what he saw destroyed his sanity in one clawing stroke.They float,’ the thing in the drain crooned in a clotted, chuckling voice. It held George’s arm in its thick and wormy grip, it pulled George toward that terrible darkness where the water rushed and roared and bellowed as it bore its cargo of storm debris toward the sea. George craned his neck away from that final blackness and began to scream into the rain, to scream mindlessly into the white autumn sky which curved above Derry on that day in the fall of 1957. His screams were shrill and piercing, and all up and down Witcham Street people came to their windows or bolted out onto their porches.
They float,’ it growled, ‘they float, Georgie, and when you’re down here with me, you’ll float, too–’
George’s shoulder socked against the cement of the curb and Dave Gardener, who had stayed home from his job at The Shoeboat that day because of the flood, saw only a small boy in a yellow rain-slicker, a small boy who was screaming and writhing in the gutter with muddy water surfing over his face and making his screams sound bubbly.
Everything down here floats,’ that chuckling, rotten voice whispered, and suddenly there was a ripping noise and a flaring sheet of agony, and George Denbrough knew no more.
Dave Gardener was the first to get there, and although he arrived only forty-five seconds after the first scream, George Denbrough was already dead. Gardener grabbed him by the back of the slicker, pulled him into the street…and began to scream himself as George’s body turned over in his hands. The left side of George’s slicker was now bright red. Blood flowed into the stormdrain from the tattered hole where his left arm had been. A knob of bone, horribly bright, peeked through the torn cloth.
The boy’s eyes stared up into the white sky, and as Dave staggered away toward the others already running pell-mell down the street, they began to fill with rain.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 14-16
“I started after him…and the clown looked back. I saw Its eyes, and all at once I understood who It was.”
“Who was it, Don?” Harold Gardner asked softly.
“It was Derry,” Don Hagarty said. “It was this town.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 36
“Everything’s a lot tougher when it’s for real. That’s when you choke. When it’s for real.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 41
“The turtle couldn’t help us.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 48
“It was easier to be brave when you were someone else.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 62
“The first real terror struck him then, and there was nothing supernatural about it. It was only a realization of how easy it was to trash your life. That was what was so scary. You just dragged the fan up to everything you had spent the years raking together and turned the motherfucker on.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 69
“You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for… and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 83
“Home is the place where when you go there, you have to finally face the thing in the dark.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 93
“I don’t understand this at all. I don’t understand any of this. Why does a story have to be socio-anything? Politics… culture… history… aren’t those natural ingredients in any story, if it’s told well? I mean…’ He looks around, sees hostile eyes, and realizes dimly that they see this as some sort of attack. Maybe it even is. They are thinking, he realizes, that maybe there is a sexist death merchant in their midst. ‘I mean… can’t you guys just let a story be a story?”
~Stephen King, It, Pages 127, 128
“Politics always change. Stories never do.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 130
“And, of course, one of the great true facts of the world is this: for every old-timer who dies, there’s a new old-timer coming along. And a good story never dies; it is always passed down.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 155
“But still, sometimes, in the heart of winter when the light outside seemed yellow- sleepy, like a cat curled up on a sofa…”
~Stephen King, It, Page 170
“If someone had asked him, “Ben, are you lonely? , ” he would have looked at that someone with real surprise. The question had never even occurred to him. He had no friends, but he had his books and his dreams; he had his Revell models; he had a gigantic set of Lincoln Logs and built all sorts of stuff with them. His mother had exclaimed more than once that Ben’s Lincoln Logs houses looked better than some real ones that came from blueprints. He had a pretty good Erector Set, too. He was hoping for the Super Set when his birthday came around in October. With that one you could build a clock that really told time and a car with real gears in it. Lonely? he might have asked in return, honestly foozled. Huh? What? A child blind from birth doesn’t even know he’s blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it. It simply was, like his double-jointed thumb or the funny little jag inside one of his front teeth, the little jag his tongue began running over whenever he was nervous.”
~Stephen King, It, Pages 177, 178
“A child blind from birth doesn’t even know he’s blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 178
“Your hair is winter fire
January embers
My heart burns there, too.”
~Stephen King, It, Pages 192, 569
“We all float down here!”
~Stephen King, It, Page 217
“For a moment he felt a wild hope: perhaps this really was a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying . . . but alive. Safe. Then he pushed the thought away. Its charm was deadly, its comfort fatal.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 318
“Mrs. Cole was a perfect democrat. She hated all kids equally.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 357
“We lie best when we lie to ourselves.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 445
“It’s offense you maybe can’t live with because it opens up a crack inside your thinking, and if you look down into it you see there are evil things down there, and they have little yellow eyes that don’t blink, and there’s a stink down there in that dark and after a while you think maybe there’s a whole other universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything, he would have told them if he could. ”
~Stephen King, It, Page 456-57
“In this universe there might grow roses which sing.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 457
“Maybe, in the end it’s the voice that tells the stories more than the stories themselves that matters.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 458
“You could start at a path leading nowhere more fantastic than from your own front steps to the sidewalk, and from there you could go… well, anywhere at all.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 458
“Maybe people really don’t change as much as we think. Maybe they just… maybe they just stiffen up.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 506
“Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls-Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his face in her heart all the time, a kind of sweet, hurtful ache. She would have died for him..”
~Stephen King, It, Page 570
“There was power in that music, a power which seemed to most rightfully belong to all the skinny kids, fat kids, ugly kids, shy kids—the world’s losers, in short.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 590
“You can’t be careful on a skateboard.”
~Stephen King, It, Pages 605, 668, 1143, 1147
“He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts”
~Stephen King, It, Pages 611, 612, 614, 617, 619, 681, 1056, 1070, and 1073
“…if this is the stuff adults have to think about I never want to grow up”
~Stephen King, It, Page 742
“The energy you drew on so extravagantly when you were a kid, the energy you thought would never exhaust itself – that slipped away somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four, to be replaced by something much duller, something as bogus as a coke high: purpose, maybe, or goals, or whatever rah-rah Junior Chamber of Commerce word you wanted to use. It was no big deal; it didn’t go all at once, with a bang. And maybe, Richie thought, that’s the scary part. How you didn’t stop being a kid all at once, with a big explosive bang, like one of that clown’s trick balloons. The kid in you just leaked out, like the air of a tire.”
~Stephen King, It, Pages 743-44
“Seven, Richie thought. That’s the magic number. There has to be seven of us. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 755
“Eddie discovered one of his childhood’s great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 782
“Maybe there aren’t any such things as good friends or bad friends – maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you’re hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they’re always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for too, if that’s what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 817
“No good friends, no bad friends; only people you want, need to be with. People who build their houses in your heart.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 817
“Come on back and we’ll see if you remember the simplest thing of all – how it is to be children, secure in belief and thus afraid of the dark.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 908
“When I die, I guess I’ll go with a library card in one hand and an OVERDUE stamp in the other. Well, maybe there’s worse ways.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 931
“Want a balloon?”
~Stephen King, It, Page 939
“I’m the Turtle, son. I made the universe, but please don’t blame me for it; I had a belly-ache.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 1070
“once you get into cosmological shit like this, you got to throw away the instruction manual”
~Stephen King, It, Page 1071
“What can be done when you’re eleven can often never be done again.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 1077
“God favors drunks, small children, and the cataclysmically stoned…”
~Stephen King, It, Page 1107
“Swear to me that if IhIh-It isn’t d-d-dead, you’ll cuh-home back.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 1129
“My heart’s with you, Bill, no matter how it turns out. My heart is with all of them, and I think that, even if we forget each other, we’ll remember in our dreams.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 1142
“I loved you guys, you know.
I loved you so much.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 1142
“I think that, even if we forget each other, we’ll remember in our dreams.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 1142
“Not all boats which sail into darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teaches that there are so many happy endings that man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 1149
“You don’t have to look back to see those children; part of your mind will see them forever. They are not necessarily the best part of you, but they were once the repository of all you could become.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 1150
“So drive away quick, drive away while the last of the light slips away, drive away from Derry, from memory…but not from desire. That stays, the bright cameo of all we were and all we believed as children, all that shone in our eyes even when we were lost and the wind blew in the night.
Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand.
All the rest is darkness.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 1150
“Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 1150
What is the famous quote from it?
“No good friends, no bad friends; only people you want, need to be with. People who build their houses in your heart.”
~Stephen King, It, Page 817
Further Reading: