I Am Legend

by Richard Matheson

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

A man could get used to anything if he had to.

Why do they all look like Kathy to me?

But is he worse than the parent who gave to society a neurotic child who became a politician?

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

He found himself wondering again why he chose to go on living. Probably, he thought, there’s no real reason. I’m just too dumb to end it all.

Choices seemed pointless now. What did it matter what he did? Life would be equally purposeless no matter what his decision was.

He knew it was the law. But how many people followed it? He wondered that too. How many husbands took the women who had shared their life and love and dropped them into flames? How many parents incinerated the children they adored, how many children tossed their beloved parents on a bonfire a hundred yards square, a hundred feet deep?

Get yourself at least one virtue, anyway.

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.

“You don’t have to feel any obligation to me just because… we’re the only ones left.”