I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.

Your friends drag you down, Gordie. Don't you know that? [...] Your friends do. They're like drowning guys that are holding onto your legs. You can't save them. You can only drown with them.

Or was it a kind of egotism masquerading as strength? She knew men were taught (primarily by other men, of course) that they were to keep their pain to themselves, but she also knew marriage was supposed to undo some of that teaching

He understood well enough how a man with a choice between pride and responsibility will almost always choose pride--if responsibility robs him of his manhood.

A gunslinger knows pride, that invisible bone that keeps the neck stiff.

Roland had taught him that self-deception was nothing but pride in disguise, an indulgence to be denied.