DT7 Quotes

Insomnia is not meant to be taken at face value:

“She’ll read it to you on the trail,” Moses said. “On your last trail, say God!”
Yes, Roland thought. One last story to hear, one last trail to follow. The one that leads to Can’-Ka No Rey, and the Dark Tower. Or it would be nice to think so.
Nancy said, “In the story, the Crimson King is using Ed Deepneau to kill one single child, a boy named Patrick Danville. Just before the attack, while Patrick and his mother are waiting for a woman to make a speech, the boy draws a picture, one that shows you, Roland, and the Crimson King, apparently imprisoned at the top of the Dark Tower.”
Roland started in his seat. “The top? Imprisoned at the top?”
“Easy,” Marian said. “Take it easy, Roland. The Calvins have been analyzing King’s work for years, every word and every reference, and everything they produce gets forwarded to the good-mind folken in New Mexico. Although these two groups have never seen each other, it would be perfectly correct to say that they work together.”
“Not that they’re always in agreement,” Nancy said.
“They sure aren’t!” Marian spoke in the exasperated tone of one who’s had to referee more than her share of squabbles. “But one thing that they are in agreement about is that King’s references to the Dark Tower are almost always masked, and sometimes mean nothing at all.”
Roland nodded. “He speaks of it because his undermind is always thinking of it, but sometimes he lapses into gibberish.”
“Yes,” Nancy said.
“But obviously you don’t think this entire book is a false trail, or you would not want to give it to me.”
“Indeed we do not,” Nancy said. “But that doesn’t mean the Crimson King is necessarily imprisoned at the top of the Tower. Although I suppose it might.”
Roland thought of his own belief that the Red King was locked out of the Tower, on a kind of balcony. Was it a genuine intuition, or just something he wanted to believe?
“In any case, we think you should watch for this Patrick Danville,” Marian said. “The consensus is that he’s a real person, but we haven’t been able to find any trace of him here. Perhaps you may find him in Thunderclap.”
“Or beyond it,” Moses put in.
Marian was nodding. “According to the story King tells in Insomnia—you’ll see for yourself—Patrick Danville dies as a young man. But that may not be true. Do you understand?”
“I’m not sure I do.”
“When you find Patrick Danville—or when he finds you— he may still be the child described in this book,” Nancy said, “or he could be as old as Uncle Mose.”
“Bad luck f’him if that be true!” said the old man, and chortled.
Roland lifted the book, stared at the red and white cover, traced the slightly raised letters that made a word he could not read. “Surely it’s just a story?”
“From the spring of 1970, when he typed the line The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed,” Marian Carver said, “very few of the things Stephen King wrote were ‘just stories.’ He may not believe that; we do.”
But years of dealing with the Crimson King may have left you with a way of jumping at shadows, do it please ya, Roland thought. Aloud he said, “If not stories, what?”
It was Moses Carver who answered. “We think maybe messages in bottles.” In the way he spoke this word — boh’uls, almost — Roland heard a heartbreaking echo of Susannah, and suddenly wanted to see her and know she was all right. This desire was so strong it left a bitter taste on his tongue.
“—that great sea.”
“Beg your pardon,” the gunslinger said. “I was wool-gathering.”
“I said we believe that Stephen King’s cast his bottles upon that great sea. The one we call the Prim. In hopes that they’ll reach you, and the messages inside will make it possible for you and my Odetta to gain your goal.”

Patrick couldn't erase the Crimson King's eyes because they were incomplete:

It’s his eyes, Roland thought. They were wide and terrible, the eyes of a dragon in human form. They were dreadfully good, but they weren’t right. Roland felt a kind of desperate, miserable certainty and shuddered from head to toe, hard enough to make his teeth chatter. They’re not quite r—
Patrick took hold of Roland’s elbow. The gunslinger had been concentrating so fiercely on the drawing that he nearly screamed. He looked up. Patrick nodded at him, then touched his fingers to the corners of his own eyes.
Yes. His eyes. I know that! But what’s wrong with them?

Needed the Rose to complete them:

Patrick interrupted his thoughts, once more pointing at the road. Pointing back the way they had come.
Roland shook his head wearily. “Even if I could fight the pull of the thing—and I couldn’t, it’s all I can do to bide here—retreat would do us no good. Once we’re no longer in cover, he’ll use whatever else he has. He has something, I’m sure of it. And whatever it is, the bullets of my revolver aren’t likely to stop it.”
Patrick shook his head hard enough to make his long hair fly from side to side. The grip on Roland’s arm tightened until the boy’s fingernails bit into the gunslinger’s flesh even through three layers of hide clothing. His eyes, always gentle and usually puzzled, now peered at Roland with a look close to fury. He pointed again with his free hand, three quick jabbing gestures with the grimy forefinger. Not at the road, however.
Patrick was pointing at the roses.
“What about them?” Roland asked. “Patrick, what about them?”
This time Patrick pointed first to the roses, then to the eyes in his picture.
And this time Roland understood.

Mixed paste from a Rose petal with some of Roland's blood:

Patrick cupped a hand beneath his mouth and spat out a red paste the color of fresh blood. The color of the Crimson King’s robe. And the exact color of his lunatic’s eyes.
Patrick, on the verge of using color for the first time in his life as an artist, made to dip the tip of his right forefinger into this paste, and then hesitated. An odd certainty came to Roland then: the thorns of these roses only pricked when their roots still tied the plant to Mim, or Mother Earth. Had he gotten his way with Patrick, Mim would have cut those talented hands to ribbons and rendered them useless.
It’s still ka, the gunslinger thought. Even out here in End-W—Before he could finish the thought, Patrick took the gunslinger’s right hand and peered into it with the intensity of a fortune-teller. He scooped up some of the blood that flowed there and mixed it with his rose-paste. Then, carefully, he took a tiny bit of this mixture upon the second finger of his right hand. He lowered it to his painting . . . hesitated . . . looked at Roland. Roland nodded to him and Patrick nodded in return, as gravely as a surgeon about to make the first cut in a dangerous operation, then applied his finger to the paper. The tip touched down as delicately as the beak of a hummingbird dipping into a flower. It colored the Crimson King’s left eye and then lifted away. Patrick cocked his head, looking at what he had done with a fascination Roland had never seen on a human face in all his long and wandering time. It was as if the boy were some Manni prophet, finally granted a glimpse of Gan’s face after twenty years of waiting in the desert.
Then he broke into an enormous, sunny grin.

Failed to erase the Crimson King's eyes because he ran out of eraser before he could do so:

In the end Patrick erased everything but the eyes, and these the remaining bit of rubber would not even blur. They remained until the piece of pink gum (originally part of a Pencil-Pak bought in a Norwich, Connecticut, Woolworth’s during a back-to-school sale in August of 1958) had been reduced to a shred the boy could not even hold between his long, dirty nails. And so he cast it away and showed the gunslinger what remained: two malevolent blood-red orbs floating three-quarters of the way up the page.
All the rest of him was gone.

The King was only able to speak to him. Nothing more.

Roland crossed to the little window, walking among the shredded bits of diaper, and looked out. The disembodied eyes sensed him and rolled over giddily to regard him. That gaze was poisonous with fury and loss.
Come out, Roland! Come out and face me one to one! Man to man! An eye for an eye, may it do ya!
“I think not,” Roland said, “for I have more work to do. A little more, even yet.”
It was his last word to the Crimson King. Although the lunatic screamed thoughts after him, he screamed in vain, for Roland never looked back. He had more stairs to climb and more rooms to investigate on his way to the top.