If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm awar… - Stephen King

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.

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.

Selectman Rennie's assumption that no one had seen Brenda come to his house that morning was correct. But she was seen in her morning travels, not by one person but by three, including one who also lived on Mill Street. If Big Jim had known, would the knowledge have given him pause? Doubtful; by then he was committed to his course and it was too late to turn back. But it might have caused him to reflect (for he was a reflective man, in his own way) on murder's similarity to Lay's potato chips: it's hard to stop with just one.