Richard Matheson > Quotes

“Thank you...for gracing my life with your lovely presence, for adding the sweet measure of your soul to my existence.”
― Richard Matheson, What Dreams May Come: A Novel

“Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.”
― Richard Matheson, I am Legend: And Other Stories

“Let this hell be our heaven.”
― Richard Matheson, What Dreams May Come: A Novel

“After a while, though, even the deepest sorrow faltered, even the most penetrating despair lost its scalpel edge.”
― Richard Matheson, I am Legend: And Other Stories

“What condemnation could possibly be more harsh than one’s own, when self-pretense is no longer possible?”
― Richard Matheson, What Dreams May Come: A Novel

“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... ”
― Richard Matheson, What Dreams May Come: A Novel

“Heaven would never be heaven without you.”
― Richard Matheson, What Dreams May Come: A Novel

“The man of my dreams is almost faded now. The one I have created in my mind. The sort of man each woman dreams of in her most secret and deepest part of her heart. I could almost see him now before me. What would I say to him if he were really here? Forgive me, I've never known this feeling. I've lived without it all my life. Is it any wonder that I fail to recognize it? You brought it to me for the first time. Is there any way I can tell you how my life has changed? Anyway at all, to let you know what sweetness you have given me? There's so much to say-- and I can't find the words-- except for these... I love you. That is what I would say to him if he were really here. ”
― Richard Matheson

“…They think of suicide as a quick route to oblivion, an escape. Far from it. It merely alters a person from one form to another. Nothing can destroy the spirit. Suicide only precipitates a darker continuation of the same conditions from which escape was sought. A condition under circumstances so much more painful.”
― Richard Matheson, What Dreams May Come: A Novel

“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, What Dreams May Come: A Novel

“All of us have a path to follow and the path begins on earth.”
― Richard Matheson, What Dreams May Come: A Novel

“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, I am Legend: And Other Stories

“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, I am Legend: And Other Stories

“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, What Dreams May Come: A Novel

“Come out, Neville.”
― Richard Matheson, I am Legend: And Other Stories

“Each memory was brought to life before me and within me. I could not avoid them. Neither could I rationalize, explain away. I could only re-experience with total cognizance, unprotected by pretense. Self delusion was impossible, truth exposed in this blinding light. Nothing as I thought it had been. Nothing as I hoped it had been. Only as it had been.”
― Richard Matheson, What Dreams May Come: A Novel

“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, What Dreams May Come: A Novel

“We've forgotten much. How to struggle, how to rise to dizzy heights and sink to unparalleled depths. We no longer aspire to anything. Even the finer shades of despair are lost to us. We've ceased to be runners. We plod from structure to conveyance to employment and back again. We live within the boundaries that science has determined for us. The measuring stick is short and sweet. The full gamut of life is a brief, shadowy continuum that runs from gray to more gray. The rainbow is bleached. We hardly know how to doubt anymore. (“The Thing”)”
― Richard Matheson, Collected Stories, Vol. 1

“In a world of monotonous horror
there could be no salvation in wild dreaming.”
― Richard Matheson, I Am Legend

“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, What Dreams May Come: A Novel

“In a world of monotonous horror there could be no salvation in wild dreaming. Horror he had adjusted to. But monotony was the greater obstacle, and he realized it now, understood it at long last. And understanding it seemed to give him a sort of quiet peace, a sense of having spread all the cards on his mental table, examined them, and settled conclusively on the desired hand.”
― Richard Matheson, I am Legend: And Other Stories

“The vampire was real. It was only that his true story had never been told.”
― Richard Matheson, I am Legend: And Other Stories

“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, What Dreams May Come: A Novel

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

All he does is drink blood.”
― Richard Matheson, I am Legend: And Other Stories

“Now when I die, I shall only be dead.”
― Richard Matheson, I am Legend: And Other Stories

“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”)”
― Richard Matheson, Collected Stories, Vol. 1

“For him the word 'horror' had become obsolete.”
― Richard Matheson, I am Legend: And Other Stories

“A man could get used to anything if he had to.”
― Richard Matheson, I am Legend: And Other Stories

“Robert Neville looked out over the new people of the earth. He knew he did not belong to them; he knew that, like the vampires, he was anathema and black terror to be destroyed. And, abruptly, the concept came, amusing to him even in his pain. ... Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.”
― Richard Matheson, I am Legend: And Other Stories

“Quiet is here and all in me. ("Dress of White Silk")”
― Richard Matheson, Collected Stories, Vol. 1

“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, Collected Stories, Vol. 1

“But are his needs any more shocking than the needs of any other animals and men? Are his deeds more outrageous than the deeds of the parent who drained the spirit from his child? The vampire may foster quickened heartbeats and levitated hair. But is he worse than the parent who gave to society a neurotic child who became a politician? Is he worse than the manufacturer who set up belated foundations with the money he made by handing bombs and guns to suicidal nationalists? Is he worse than the distiller who gave bastardized grain juice to stultify further the brains of those who, sober, were incapable of progressive thought? (Nay, I apologize for this calumny; I nip the brew that feeds me.) Is he worse, then, than the publisher who filled ubiquitous racks with lust and death wishes? Really, no, search your soul, lovie--is the vampire so bad?”
― Richard Matheson, I am Legend: And Other Stories

“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, Collected Stories, Vol. 1

“(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, What Dreams May Come: A Novel

“Let the jagged edge of sobriety be now dulled.”
― Richard Matheson, I am Legend: And Other Stories

“Not only did I rediscover every experience of my life, I had to live each unfulfilled desire as well—as though they’d been fulfilled. I saw that what transpires in the mind is just as real as any flesh and blood occurrence. What had only been imagination in life, now became tangible, each fantasy a full reality. I lived them all—while, at the same time, standing to the side, a witness to their, often, intimate squalor. A witness cursed with total objectivity.”
― Richard Matheson, What Dreams May Come: A Novel

“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, Collected Stories, Vol. 1

“God help me, he thought. God help all us poor wretches who could create and find we must lose our hearts for it because we cannot afford to spend our time at it. (“Mad House”)”
― Richard Matheson, Collected Stories, Vol. 1

“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.”
― Richard Matheson, Now You See It . . .

“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, I am Legend: And Other Stories

“When Morton Silkline reached the hall, his customer was just flapping out a small window. Quite suddenly, Morton Silkline found the floor.”
― Richard Matheson, I Am Legend

“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

“…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, What Dreams May Come: A Novel

“…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, What Dreams May Come: A Novel

“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. (“Mad House”)”
― Richard Matheson, Collected Stories, Vol. 1

“I don the robe of hermit without a cry.”
― Richard Matheson, I am Legend: And Other Stories

“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, I Am Legend

“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, I am Legend: And Other Stories

“A surfeiting of terror soon made terror a cliché.”
― Richard Matheson, I am Legend: And Other Stories

“To his complete astonishment, he later found himself
offering up a stumbling prayer that the dog would be protected. It was a mo ment in which he felt
a desperate need to believe in a God that shepherded his own creations. But, even praying, he
felt a twinge of self-reproach, and knew he might start mocking his own prayer at any second.
Somehow, though, he managed to ignore his iconoclastic self and went on praying anyway.
Because he wanted the dog, because he needed the dog.”
― Richard Matheson, I Am Legend