Richard Matheson Quotes

Really now, search your soul, lovie-is the vampire so bad?

All he does is drink blood.

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?

I couldn’t tell you, Robert, what the higher ramifications are of being soul mates. I can tell you this however. As long as you are separated from your own, that long are you troubled. No matter what the circumstances, no matter how exquisite the environment in which you find yourself. To be half

Very well then! I'll write, write write. He let the words soak into his mind and displace all else.

A man had a choice, after all. He devoted his life to his work or to his wife and children and home. It could not be combined; not in this day and age. In this insane world where God was second to income and goodness to wealth.

God, how impossible life is without money. Nothing can ever overcome it, it's everything when it's anything. How can I write in peace with endless worries of money, money, money? (“Disappearing Act”)

…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.

Everything seemed to flood over him then. It was as though he’d been the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, refusing to let the sea of reason in.

Despite everything he had or might have (except, of course, another human being), life gave no promise of improvement or even of change. The way things shaped up, he would live out his life with no more than he already had. And how many years was that? Thirty, maybe forty if he didn’t drink himself to death. The thought of forty more years of living as he was made him shudder

For him the word 'horror' had become obsolete.

For he was a man and he was alone and these things had no importance to him.

You can get used to horror, he thought. When it has lost immediacy and is no longer pungent and has become a steady diet. When it has degraded to a chain of mind-numbing events. (“Lover When You're Near Me”)

Crossing your fingers, Neville? Knocking on wood?
He ignored that, beginning to suspect his mind of harboring an alien. Once he might have termed it conscience. Now it was only an annoyance. Morality, after all, had fallen with society. He was his own ethic.
Makes a good excuse, doesn’t it, Neville? Oh, shut up.

He stood there for a moment looking around the silent room, shaking his head slowly. All these books, he thought, the residue of a planet's intellect, the scrapings of futile minds, the leftovers, the potpourri of artifacts that had no power to save men from perishing.

Such thoughts were a hideous testimony to the world he had accepted; a world in which murder was easier than hope.

Shall I kill her now? Shall I not even investigate, but kill her and burn her?
His throat moved. Such thoughts were a hideous testimony to the world he had accepted; a world in which murder was easier than hope.