Misery

"That was only one of the things about Annie that scared him."

Within his first few days of consciousness, Paul discovers that Annie doesn't know exactly what she's doing in terms of his care. He also discovers that Annie has a huge amount of Novril, that he's hooked on the Novril, and that Annie is "dangerously crazy" (10).

"She was crazy but he needed her."

Like Stephen King needed his drugs of choice and fan base, Paul depends on Annie to live. She feeds Paul, tends to his injuries, and administers his pain medication. Though Annie is Paul's captor, he depends on her. This relationship dictates the course of the novel.

"Yet, miserable or not (and he was), he still wanted to live."

Paul's will to live is so strong that he survives, not only a serious car accident, but subsequent imprisonment, torture, further injury, infection, and addiction. Without this will, Paul's character would not have survived Annie's captivity.

"Do you think this is a movie or a TV show and you are getting graded by some audience on your bravery?"

Though he's subject to peril, Paul never seems to lose the sense that he will survive his situation. Nor does he ever give up thinking about his situation in terms of hindsight, as in how well Misery's Return will sell given  the conditions under which it was written. Paul thinks often about how he will interact with the outside world once he escapes.

"She had stolen a rare bird with beautiful feathers—a rare bird which came from Africa."

Paul identifies himself with an African bird he once saw at the zoo as a child. The bird's captivity in a place so far from home upset Paul; he feels  similarly upset about his own condition.

"You speak as though I were keeping you prisoner, Paul."

Though Annie has kidnapped and held Paul against his will, Annie never admits this to herself. Throughout his imprisonment, Annie thinks of herself as helping her favorite author write a better book than Fast Cars. In her psychosis, Annie sees herself as doing Paul a favor.

"But I am not stupid, Paul, and I am not slow."

Annie tells Paul that he shouldn't try to trick or fool her because, despite her dowdy appearance, she is bright. She proves this many times: finding the knife under Paul's mattress, knowing he left the room, spotting the black marks on the doorframe. However, she doesn't catch Paul in his final trick.

"Without Misery, there would simply be no life left for him, or in him"

Paul writes this in the first version of Misery's Return about Ian Carmichael,  Misery's grieving husband. However, this could be said of Paul, too. Without    the commercial success of his Misery novels, Paul Sheldon wouldn't be a  well-known author. In Annie's captivity, too, it's the writing of Misery's Return that drives Paul to continue living. Figuratively, too, Paul suffers from his alcohol addiction, failed marriages, and inability to gain recognition as a "serious" writer, emphasizing the theme of Dependency and Self-Actualization.

"Maybe not all that realistic, but fair."

Annie says this regarding the resolutions to the chapter-plays she loved as a kid. She uses these resolutions as inspiration for Paul to figure out how to bring Misery back from the dead. Annie doesn't care how believable it is, she only wants Misery not to die.

"I suppose you think of escape. So does a rat in a trap, I'm sure, in its way."

During one of Annie's worst episodes, she brings a still-living, trapped rat into Paul's room. The struggling, injured rat provides an apt metaphor for Paul's own situation in which Annie has rendered him incapable of physical movement. However, Annie isn't naïve enough to think Paul hasn't considered escape.

"But she did it, Paul, she fucking did it, and you know it."

When Paul realizes Annie was 11 years old when the deadly fire took place in her apartment building, he wants to think that Annie didn't do it. However, Paul quickly realizes that, even at that age, Annie's thought process was the same. The Krenmitz kids were brats so she decided to kill them.

"In Annie's view all the people in the world were divided into three groups: brats, poor poor things…and Annie."

Annie murdered children she thought were brats and terminal elderly patients and infants she thought were "poor poor things." Given Annie's worldview, no one is safe from her violence. Paul exercises constant caution to stay on Annie's marginal good side though he knows she plans to kill him either way.

"The irony was that the woman had coerced him into writing what was easily the best of the Misery novels."

Though he's upset at having to burn Fast Cars, Paul comes to believe Misery's Return is the best thing he's ever written. Whether this is true, or if he only believes it in his state of pain- and drug-induced delirium, is unclear. Thus, Paul's relationship with Annie is not so clear-cut.

"The dirty birdies around here would say anything to get me in trouble or smear my name."

Despite logic, Annie has a deep paranoia that the people around her have it in for her for no reason. She never admits culpability for any of her murders or acts of violence. Annie also refuses to use cuss words, instead preferring odd euphemisms like “dirty bird,” which she also calls Paul, who thinks of himself as a rare, African bird.

"What you keep overlooking, because it's so obvious, is that you were—are—also Scheherazade to yourself."

Paul imagines himself as Scheherazade, the fictional character who spares her own life by telling stories to her husband to keep him from killing her in One Thousand and One Nights. At first, Paul considers Annie the husband, but then he realizes that he actually wants to finish Misery's Return—not for Annie's sake, but for his own. As long as he continues writing, Annie will spare his life and he can finish the novel.

"The gotta, as in: ‘I think I'll stay up another fifteen-twenty minutes, honey, I gotta see how this chapter comes out.’"

Paul had started writing Misery's Return to appease Annie and prolong his  life, but then he becomes gripped by the need to know what will happen next in his own novel. Just as Annie had been drawn in by the chapter-plays of her youth, Paul stumbles into being drawn in by his own writing.

"He had done amazingly well for a man who had once found it impossible to write if he was out of cigarettes or if he had a backache or a headache a degree or two above a low drone."

Through his ordeal with Annie, Paul finds himself stripped of the usual distractions but faced with unusual circumstances. However, he surprises himself with his ability to write even with severe injuries, including an impromptu amputation. His frequent dosing of Novril, though, helps.

"Had he known, before this had he really known how badly she had cowed him, or how much of his essential self—the liver and lights of his spirit—she had scraped away?"

When he finds himself unable to scream for help when Officer Kushner arrives, Paul realizes that Annie has gotten under his skin more than he thought. While Paul wants to scream, a voice inside his head says, "I'll be good, Annie! I won't scream!" at the same time (267). Until this moment, it  seems, Paul has deluded himself into thinking he has the upper hand in the situation.

"It occurred to him that the mind and the mower had a lot in common—what you could see looked all right."

Paul watches Annie hose down the lawn mower she uses to kill Officer Kushner and sees that she forgets to hose off the blade underneath which is covered in blood. Paul likens the seemingly clean mower to Annie's   seemingly clean outward appearance, both of which mask horrible truths.

"Maybe he had wildly overestimated just how good Fast Cars had been."

Paul's delirious state of mind, induced by the Novril, his pain, and Annie's   torture, make him doubt himself in ways he never thought he would. Because no one but himself and Annie have read Fast Cars, Paul has no way of knowing whether or not it was a good novel. This relates to The Perils of Fame, in which the writer loses his ability to judge his own work.

"The reason authors almost always put a dedication on a book, Annie, is because their selfishness even horrifies themselves in the end."

When Annie tells Paul that he's not just writing Misery's Return for her anymore, he agrees. What Paul doesn't tell Annie is that he's never written for anyone but himself. It's Paul's 'selfishness' that drives him to continue living in order to finish the novel.

"Paul though that the occasional moments like this were the most ghastly of all, because in them he saw the woman she might have been if her upbringing had been right or the drugs squirted out by all the funny little glands inside her had been less wrong."

Towards the end of his captivity, Annie admits that she was wrong to buy him an old typewriter. Paul feels an uncomfortable tenderness toward Annie, or at least the person she could have been under different circumstances. This is a rare feeling for Paul and a rare moment for Annie.

"You can't kill the goddess. The goddess is immortal."

While trying to kill Annie, Paul has this thought. On a literal level, it's true.    Paul fails to kill Annie despite his best efforts and eventual escape. On a  figurative level, it's also true. Even after Paul finds out that Annie did die from injuries she sustained during their fight, he finds himself unable to stop thinking about Annie. He encounters her in daily waking nightmares and is haunted by his addictions. This represents the theme of Confronting Addiction, which does not end even after an individual no longer uses the drug.