Top 100 Richard Matheson Quotes
#2. That's what was wrong with drinking too much. You became immune to drunken delights. There was no solace in liquor. Before you got happy, you collapsed.
Richard Matheson
#3. Chris:I forgive you.
Annie: For killing my children and my sweet husband?
Chris: For being so wonderful a guy would choose hell over heaven just to be around you.
Richard Matheson
#5. He turned away from the bar as if he could leave the question there. But questions had no location; they could follow him around.
Richard Matheson
#6. On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back.
Richard Matheson
#8. What dreams you white-frocked kiddies have in the sanctified cloister of your laboratories. You can make yourself believe anything after a while. As long as you can make up a measurement for it.
Richard Matheson
#9. I looked at all the people, feeling sorry for them. They were still subordinate to clock and calendar. Absolved of that, I stood becalmed.
Richard Matheson
#10. Thank you ... for gracing my life with your lovely presence, for adding the sweet measure of your soul to my existence.
Richard Matheson
#11. After a while, though, even the deepest sorrow faltered, even the most penetrating despair lost its scalpel edge.
Richard Matheson
#12. I hope people are reading my work in the future. I hope I have done more than frightened a couple of generations. I hope I've inspired a few people one way or another.
Richard Matheson
#13. I'm sitting in my office trying to squeeze a story from my head. It is that kind of morning when you feel like melting the typewriter into a bar of steel and clubbing yourself to death with it. ("Advance Notice")
Richard Matheson
#15. The day the library was shut down, he thought, some maiden librarian had moved down the room, pushing each chair against its table. Carefully, with a plodding precision that was the cachet of herself.
Richard Matheson
#16. Everyone has something to hide. And if they couldn't hide it the world would be in a lot worse mess than it is.
Richard Matheson
#17. Patience, he told himself. Get yourself at least one virtue, anyway.
Richard Matheson
#18. For he was a man and he was alone and these things had no importance to him.
Richard Matheson
#20. Here we are, kiddies, sitting like a bug in a rug, snugly, surrounded by a battalion of bloodsuckers who wish no more than to sip freely of my bonded, 100 proof hemoglobin. Have a drink, men, this one's really on me.
Richard Matheson
#23. But it's so hard to make things simple and so easy to make them complicated.
Richard Matheson
#24. I hate it when something I've had published "inspires" some nut to imitate what I've written, or some teacher gets fired for having her students read one of my stories or novels.
Richard Matheson
#25. He forgot everything, time and place; it was just the two of them together, needing each other, survivors of a black terror embracing because they had found each other.
Richard Matheson
#26. Maurice Nicoll says all history is a living today. We are not enjoying one spark of life in a huge, dead waste. We are, instead, existing at one point in a vast process of the living who still think and feel but are invisible to us.
Richard Matheson
#27. Death is a fascinating lure to men who can stand aside and watch it operate on someone else. (from "The Conqueror")
Richard Matheson
#28. To look at the entire journey all at once was stupidity. You thought of it in segments; that was the only way.
Richard Matheson
#29. It was more than a spider. It was every unknown terror in the world fused into wriggling, poison-jawed horror. It was every anxiety, insecurity, and fear in his life given a hideous, night-black form.
Richard Matheson
#30. How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough.
Richard Matheson
#32. 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?
Richard Matheson
#33. 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.
Richard Matheson
#34. The red hands had stopped at four-twenty-seven. He wondered what day they had stopped. As he descended the stairs with his armful of books, he wondered at just what moment the clock stopped. Had it been morning or night? Was it raining or shining? Was anyone there when it stopped?
Richard Matheson
#35. Everyone has a secret place in his mind. Otherwise relationships would be impossible.
Richard Matheson
#37. Was the life force something more than words, a tangible, mind-controlling potency? Was nature somehow, in him, maintaining its spark against its own encroachments?
Richard Matheson
#39. Really now, search your soul, lovie-is the vampire so bad?
All he does is drink blood.
Richard Matheson
#40. Morality, after all, had fallen with society. He was his own ethic. Makes
Richard Matheson
#41. If you go too far in fantasy and break the string of logic, and become nonsensical, someone will surely remind you of your dereliction ... Pound for pound, fantasy makes a tougher opponent for the creative person.
Richard Matheson
#42. They won't accept reasonable things with their minds but the fantastic things they'll swallow whole when their emotions are brought into play. Because the emotions have no limits on belief. The emotions will swallow anything - and they do.
Richard Matheson
#43. 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. His
Richard Matheson
#44. Such thoughts were a hideous testimony to the world he had accepted; a world in which murder was easier than hope.
Richard Matheson
#45. There we will, I pray, remain and learn and grow until the time when we will rise together to the ultimate heights, changing in appearance but never in devotion, sharing the transcendent glory of our love through all eternity.
Richard Matheson
#46. ... Those who've marred their appearance in any way by their actions in life aren't forced to witness that marring. If they were, they'd become self-conscious and be unable to concentrate on improving themselves.
Richard Matheson
#48. 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.
Richard Matheson
#49. As her analyst had told her: the deeper buried the distress, the further into the body it went. The digestive system was about as far as it could go to hide.
Richard Matheson
#50. 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
Richard Matheson
#51. I wrote about real people and real circumstances and real neighborhoods. There was no crypt or castles or H.P. Lovecraft-type environments. They were just about normal people who had something bizarre happening to them in the neighborhood.
Richard Matheson
#52. This, he knew, was courage, the truest, ultimate courage, because there was no one here to sympathize or praise him for it. What he felt was felt without the hope of commendation.
Richard Matheson
#53. 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.
Richard Matheson
#54. No, by God, he had no intention of going on like a blind man, plodding down a path of brainless, fruitless existence until old age or accident took him. Either he found the answer or he ditched the whole mess, life included.
Richard Matheson
#55. (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?
Richard Matheson
#56. What condemnation could possibly be more harsh than one's own, when self-pretense is no longer possible?
Richard Matheson
#57. Because there was only one thing worse than dying. And that was knowing you were going to die. And where. And how. ("Death Ship")
Richard Matheson
#58. 'I Am Legend' is quite unusual for its time. I just wanted to write a story about female boxers, and I couldn't get that going in my mind. I don't know exactly where the idea of just a man pitting himself against a robot boxer came from.
Richard Matheson
#59. I could never write about strange kingdoms. I could never do 'Harry Potter' or anything like that. Even when I did science-fiction, I didn't write about foreign planets and distant futures. I certainly never did fantasies about trolls living under bridges.
Richard Matheson
#60. That wind of terrible and jealous beauty blowing over me - that dark fire, that music ...
Richard Matheson
#61. But now, in the final hours, even hope had vanished. Yet he could smile. At a point without hope he had found contentment. He knew he had tried and there was nothing to be sorry for. And this was complete victory, because it was a victory over himself.
Richard Matheson
#62. When you sleep, your dream world is as real to you as life, isn't it?
Richard Matheson
#63. To me there is nothing that goes against nature. If it seems incomprehensible, it's only because we haven't been able to understand it yet.
Richard Matheson
#64. Perhaps jungle life, despite physical danger, was a relaxing one. Surely it was free of the petty grievances, the disparate values of society. It was simple, devoid of artifice and ulcer-burning pressures.
Richard Matheson
#65. I felt puny and absurd, a ludicrous midget. Easy enough to talk of soul and spirit and essential worth, but not when you're three feet tall.
Richard Matheson
#66. There was no sound but that of his shoes and the now senseless singing of birds. Once I thought they sang because everything was right with the world, Robert Neville thought. I know now I was wrong. They sing because they're feeble minded.
Richard Matheson
#67. When Morton Silkline reached the hall, his customer was just flapping out a small window. Quite suddenly, Morton Silkline found the floor.
Richard Matheson
#68. All of us have a path to follow and the path begins on earth.
Richard Matheson
#69. The cross. He held one in his hand, gold and shiny in the morning sun. This, too, drove the vampires away.
Why? Was there a logical answer, something he could accept without slipping on banana skins of mysticism?
Richard Matheson
#70. Memory was such a worthless thing, really. Nothing it dealt with was attainable. It was concerned with phantom acts and feelings, with all that was uncapturable except in thought. It was without satisfaction.
Richard Matheson
#72. She sounded angry. That was the way she'd been as long as he'd known her. If she became ill, it irritated her. She was annoyed by sickness. She seemed to regard it as a personal affront.
Richard Matheson
#73. No longer will you be a weird Robinson Crusoe, imprisoned on an island of night surrounded by oceans of death.
Richard Matheson
#74. And, before science had caught up with the legend, the legend had swallowed science and everything.
Richard Matheson
#76. The vampire was real. It was only that his true story had never been told.
Richard Matheson
#77. It is my conviction that basic Reality is not all that perplexing. What seems difficult to assimilate are the manifold details of Reality, not its fundamental elements.
Richard Matheson
#78. 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.
Richard Matheson
#79. Well, why not? Why not go out? It was a sure way to be free of them.
Richard Matheson
#80. Fresh air, quiet, and the calming stimulus of the movement on the earth beneath the sky; that's why she loves to walk so much.
Richard Matheson
#81. Desperate need to believe in a God that shepherded his own creations.
Richard Matheson
#82. I wish I were a boy again-unquestioning, with no need to analyze the moment.
Richard Matheson
#83. Staring down at the brook, I remembered a stream near Mammoth Lake. We'd parked the camper just above it and, all night, listened to it splashing across rocks and stones; a lovely sound.
Richard Matheson
#84. From that day on he learned to accept the
dungeon he existed in, neither seeking to escape with sudden derring-do nor beating his pate
bloody on its walls.
And, thus resigned, he returned to work.
Richard Matheson
#85. The keynote of minority prejudice is this: They are loathed because they are feared.
Richard Matheson
#88. I think What Dreams May Come is the most important (read effective) book I've written. It has caused a number of readers to lose their fear of death the finest tribute any writer could receive ... Somewhere In Time is my favorite novel.
Richard Matheson
#90. 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.
Richard Matheson
#91. If men only felt about death as they do about sleep, all terrors would cease ... Men sleep contentedly, assured that they will wake the following morning. They should feel the same about their lives.
Richard Matheson
#92. The foraging for food and water, the struggle for life in a world without masters, housed in a body that man had made dependent on himself.
Richard Matheson
#93. I had to write about realistic circumstances. That's the way my brain works. And I think that gave me a sort of place in the field.
Richard Matheson
#94. Normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man.
Richard Matheson
#95. Somewhere In Time is the story of a love which transcends time , What Dreams May Come is the story of a love which transcends death ... I feel that they represent the best writing I have done in the novel form.
Richard Matheson
#96. ... 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.
Richard Matheson
#97. 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")
Richard Matheson
#98. You bastard, he thought, almost affectionately, watching the minuscule protoplasm fluttering on the slide. You dirty little bastard.
Richard Matheson
#99. I think we're yearning for something beyond the every day. And I will tell you I don't believe in the supernatural, I believe in the supernormal.
Richard Matheson
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