He thought about that visionary lady. To die, he thought, never knowing the fierce joy and attendant comfort of a loved one's embrace. To sink into t… - Richard Matheson

Don’t families stay together?” “Not necessarily,” he told me. “Earth ties have less meaning here. Relationships of thought, not blood, are what count.

You never know, he thought. You just never know. You drift along, year after year, presuming certain values to be fixed; like being able to drive on a public thoroughfare without somebody trying to murder you. You came to depend on that sort of thing. Then something occurs and all bets are off. One shocking incident and all the years of logic and acceptance are displaced and, suddenly, the jungle is in front of you again. Man, part animal, part angel. Where had he come across that phrase? He shivered. It was entirely an animal in that truck out there.

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