Richard Matheson Quotes

(After death.) So few people who come across, possess awareness of any kind. All they bring along with them are worthless values. All they desire is continuation of what they had in life no matter how misguided or degraded. . . Will those people ever progress, even with our help?

Chris Nielsen: Thank you for every kindness. Thank you for our children. For the first time I saw them. Thank you for being someone I was always proud to be with. For your guts, for your sweetness. For how you always looked, for how I always wanted to touch you. God, you were my life. I apologize for everytime I ever failed you. Especially this one...

And, before science had caught up with the legend, the legend had swallowed science and everything.

If I could die now, he thought; peacefully, gently, without a tremor or a crying out. If I could be with her. If I could believe I would be with her.

I’m an animal! he exulted. I’m a dumb, stupid animal and I’m going to drink!

All through the years, I've had many interests. I always wanted to write a swashbuckler; I still do. I love Westerns. I wrote a western called "Journal of the Gun Years," which won the Golden Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. It had been written some time ago and rejected by every publisher, perhaps because I had been cast in the science fiction mold. I finished writing a combination western and horror story indigenous to the period. And horror takes many forms: Indians had their own superstitions based on things that they didn't understand. In a way, I like to be confusing by combining genres. I've always been fascinated by parapsychology, and I think that we've all lived before. In "The Path" I've explored that and a few other age-old questions like why are we here and what's our purpose in life.

The strength of the vampire is that no one will believe in him.

After a while, though, even the deepest sorrow faltered, even the most penetrating despair lost its scalpel edge. The flagellant’s curse, he thought, to grow inured even to the whip.

I can get pissed off very easily.

Failures plagued me. Things I had omitted or ignored, neglected. What I should have given and hadn’t. I felt the biting pang of every unfulfillment.

…Not that it was unjust; not that the scales were forced out of balance. Where there had been good, it showed as clearly. Kindnesses, accomplishments, all those were present, too.

If you only knew the beauty which awaits you, Daniel. If you only knew how lovely are the realms which lie beyond this house. Would you keep yourself locked in a barren cell when all the beauties of the universe await you on the outside?

How shall I typify what happened? Passion play? Somewhat. Weird tale? Indubitably. Horror story? Pretty close. Grotesque melodrama? Certainly. Black comedy? Your point of view will determine that. Perhaps it was a combination of them all...
So, to the story. A chronicle of greed and cruelty, horror and rapacity, sadism and murder.
Love, American style.

But it was hard to keep his hands still. He could almost feel them twitching emphatically with his strong desire to reach out and stroke the dog's head. He had such a terrible yearning to love something again, and the dog was such a beautiful ugly dog.

Morality, after all, had fallen with society. He was his own ethic.