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23fef80
|
He kept thinking about Mary. What a fool he'd been to let her go. To think, with the thoughtless assurance of youth, that the world was replete with endless possibilities. He'd thought it a mistake to choose so early in life and embrace the present good. He'd been a great one for looking for greener pastures. He'd kept looking until all his pastures were brown with time. ("Old Haunts")"
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|
opportunity
love
|
Richard Matheson |
|
8a9fff7
|
In a typical desperation for quick answers, easily understood, people had turned to primitive worship as the solution. With less than success. Not only had they died as quickly as the rest of the people, but they had died with terror in their hearts, with a mortal dread flowing in their very veins.
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|
religion
|
Richard Matheson |
|
e33fbe0
|
When Morton Silkline reached the hall, his customer was just flapping out a small window. Quite suddenly, Morton Silkline found the floor.
|
|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
13653ba
|
You bastard, he thought, almost affectionately, watching the minuscule protoplasm fluttering on the slide. You dirty little bastard.
|
|
richard-matheson
post-apocalyptic
|
Richard Matheson |
|
86ddfb4
|
Miniture protoplasm, the dirty little bastard!
|
|
horror
|
Richard Matheson |
|
94c99c2
|
It was a moment 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 |
|
239eafe
|
But are his needs any more shocking than the needs of 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?
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|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
7356905
|
Then he went into the dining room, consulting his watch. It was ten thirty already. More than half the morning was gone. More than half the time for sitting and trying to write the prose that would make people sit up and gasp. It happened that way more often now than he would even admit to himself. Sleeping late, making up errands, doing anything to forestall the terrible moment when he must sit down before his typewriter and try to wrench ..
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|
writing
writer-s-block
|
Richard Matheson |
|
c3d9329
|
She felt all right. Her heart was like a drum hanging from piano wire in her chest, slowly, slowly beaten. Her hands and feet were numb, not with cold but with a sultry torpor. Thoughts moved with a tranquil lethargy, her brain a leisurely machine imbedded in swaths of woolly packing. She felt all right.
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|
lethargy
torpor
tranquilization
tranquility
|
Richard Matheson |
|
3118220
|
The silence of the library was complete save for the thudding of his shoes as he walked along the second-floor hallway. Outside, there were birds sometimes and, even lacking that, there seemed to be a sort of sound outside. Inexplicable, perhaps, but it never seemed deathly still in the open as it did inside a building. Especially here in this giant, gray-stoned building that housed the literature of a world's dead.
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|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
1219aad
|
Pero luego el silencio cubrio las cabezas, como una manta pesada. Todos volvieron hacia Neville unos rostros palidos. Neville los observo serenamente. Y de pronto comprendio. Yo soy el anormal ahora. La normalidad es un concepto mayoritario. Norma de muchos, no de un solo hombre. Y comprendio, tambien, la expresion de aquellos rostros: angustia, miedo, horror. Tenian miedo, si. Era para ellos un monstruo terrible y desconocido, una malignid..
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|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
b10d337
|
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.
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|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
7d9fb17
|
Se estrecha el circulo. Un nuevo terror nacido de la muerte, una nueva supersticion que invade la fortaleza del tiempo. Soy leyenda.
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|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
f63a660
|
The last man in the world was irretrievably stuck with his delusions.
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|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
c7e46dd
|
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.
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|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
ebb8700
|
All right, little boy, he tried kidding himself, calm down now. Santa Claus is coming to town with all the nice answers. No longer will you be a weird Robinson Crusoe, imprisoned on an island of night surrounded by oceans of death.
|
|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
05506c5
|
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 |
|
8348946
|
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.
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|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
c4ab006
|
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. Mostly, it hurt...
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|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
cbe2ca4
|
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.
|
|
hope
victory
|
Richard Matheson |
|
35055c7
|
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.
|
|
fear
insecurity
terror
|
Richard Matheson |
|
3df5534
|
To look at the entire journey all at once was stupidity. You thought of it in segments; that was the only way.
|
|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
1f42129
|
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.
|
|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
e2d20ea
|
Does a man's existence change in any way when he removes his overcoat? Neither does it change when death removes the overcoat of his body. He's still the same person. No wiser. No happier. No better off. Exactly the same. "Death is merely continuation at another level."
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|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
14d72b8
|
People on earth are never alone," he explained. "There's always someone as a guide for each individual." --
|
|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
0d12881
|
No sabia cuanto tiempo habia pasado alli. Al fin, penso, aun el dolor mas profundo se aplaca, la desesperacion mas intensa se desvanece. La maldicion del verdugo: la victima se acostumbra al latigo.
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|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
4e323ae
|
When matter is put aside, all creation becomes exclusively mental, that's all.
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|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
11c50b7
|
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 |
|
e3011c8
|
desperate need to believe in a God that shepherded his own creations.
|
|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
29e6d0e
|
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.
|
|
life
society
|
Richard Matheson |
|
d77921b
|
He brushed his teeth carefully and used dental floss. He tried to take good care of his teeth because he was his own dentist now. Some things could go to pot, but not his health, he thought. Then why don't you stop pouring alcohol into yourself? he thought. Why don't you shut the hell up? he thought.
|
|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
f3ff440
|
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.
|
|
courage
praise
|
Richard Matheson |
|
4fc1553
|
That wind of terrible and jealous beauty blowing over me--that dark fire, that music ...
|
|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
0a3aa65
|
Todos volvieron hacia Neville los rostros palidos. Neville los observo serenamente. Y de pronto comprendio. Yo soy el anormal ahora. La normalidad es un concepto mayoritario. Norma de muchos, no de un solo hombre.
|
|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
2b6fde7
|
Well, why not? Why go out? It was a sure way to be free of them.
|
|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
10f5ede
|
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 |
|
4c3ea40
|
The strength of the vampire is that no one will believe in him." Thank you, Dr. Van Helsing, he thought, putting down his copy of Dracula." --
|
|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
fff9f4b
|
Don't families stay together?" "Not necessarily," he told me. "Earth ties have less meaning here. Relationships of thought, not blood, are what count."
|
|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
7a34e4b
|
It's at times like this I hate the brain. It always builds more barriers than it can topple.
|
|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
b6b0011
|
Even though they fought, their fighting never turned them against each other. It always ended with them embracing and kissing, smiling, laughing.
|
|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
10fa7a8
|
Why should a Jew fear the cross?" he said. "Why should a vampire who had been a Jew fear it? Most people were afraid of becoming vampires. Most of them suffer from hysterical blindness before mirrors. But as far as the cross goes--well, neither a Jew nor a Hindu nor a Mohammedan nor an atheist, for that matter, would fear the cross." She"
|
|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
cc366d2
|
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 |
|
60ddfda
|
It was not my pain but Ann's. She was crying, frightened. Because I was hurt. She was afraid for me. I felt her anguish. She was suffering terribly. I tried to will away the shadows but I couldn't. Tried in vain to speak her name. Don't cry, I thought. I'll be all right. Don't be afraid. I love you, Ann. Where are you?
|
|
|
Richard Matheson |
|
5b67768
|
Was there a logical answer, something he could accept without slipping on banana skins of mysticism?
|
|
|
Richard Matheson |