Top 140 Richard Matheson Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Now when I die, I shall only be dead.”

— Richard Matheson

52. “As he stepped into the sunlight, he heard the seals barking loudly. They must have an audience. Slick glory seekers. Whiskered prima donnas.”

— Richard Matheson

53. “It’s a time when men and women come to know what they truly are. A time of purging.” I’d been looking at the ceiling as he spoke. At his final words, I turned to face him in surprise. “Is that what the Catholics mean by purgatory?” “In essence.” He nodded. “A period during which each soul is cleansed by a self-imposed recognition of past deeds – and misdeeds.”

— Richard Matheson

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

— Richard Matheson

55. “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

56. “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

57. “After a while, though, even the deepest sorrow faltered, even the most penetrating despair lost its scalpel edge. The flagellant’s curse, he thought, to grow inured even to the whip.”

— Richard Matheson

58. “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

59. “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

60. “The last man in the world was irretrievably stuck with his delusions.”

— Richard Matheson

61. “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

62. “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.”

— Richard Matheson

63. “Death is a fascinating lure to men who can stand aside and watch it operate on someone else.”

— Richard Matheson

64. “I’m an animal! he exulted. I’m a dumb, stupid animal and I’m going to drink!”

— Richard Matheson

65. “I stood there feeling nowhere.”

— Richard Matheson

66. “To be half of one can only be a torment when the other half is gone.”

— Richard Matheson

67. “Everyone has a secret place in his mind. Otherwise relationships would be impossible.”

— Richard Matheson

68. “For him the word ‘horror’ had become obsolete.”

— Richard Matheson

69. “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

70. “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

71. “People on earth are never alone,” he explained. “There’s always someone as a guide for each individual.”

— Richard Matheson

72. “I loved Ann and would help her. Nothing in the depths of Hell would keep me from it.”

— Richard Matheson

73. “Miniture protoplasm, the dirty little bastard!”

— Richard Matheson

74. “For everything in life, there’s a counterpart in afterlife. This includes the most beautiful as well as the ugliest of phenomena.”

— Richard Matheson

75. “It was a high ceilinged room with tall, large-panes windows. Apart from the doorway was the desk where book had been checked out in days when books were still being checked out. 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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “You bastard, he thought, almost affectionately, watching the minuscule protoplasm fluttering on the slide. You dirty little bastard.”

— Richard Matheson

79. “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

80. “Send her loving thoughts,” he told me. “That’s all?” “That’s quite a lot, Chris,” he said. “Thoughts are very real.”

— Richard Matheson

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “Is he worse, then, than the publisher who filled ubiquitous racks with lust and death wishes? Really, now, search your soul, lovie – is the vampire so bad?”

— Richard Matheson

85. “It’s at times like this I hate the brain. It always builds more barriers than it can topple.”

— Richard Matheson

86. “And to kill one’s self is to violate the law because it deprives that self of working out the needs of its life.”

— Richard Matheson

87. “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

88. “Oh, they knew it was something, but it couldn’t be that – not that. That was imagination, that was superstition, there was no such thing as that. And before science had caught up with the legend, the legend had swallowed science and everything.”

— Richard Matheson

89. “To look at the entire journey all at once was stupidity. You thought of it in segments; that was the only way.”

— Richard Matheson

90. “Why do you want me to stay?” she asked unhappily. He looked at her without a definite answer in his mind. Then he said, “Even if you are infected, I can’t let you go out there. You don’t know what they’d do to you.” Her eyes closed. “I don’t care,” she said. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN “I don’t understand it,” he told her over supper.”

— Richard Matheson

91. “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

92. “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

93. “He’d been a great one for looking for greener pastures. He’d kept looking until all his pastures were brown with time.”

— Richard Matheson

94. “Emily Post mincing through the graveyard. Etiquette for Young Vampires.”

— Richard Matheson

95. “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

96. “No, no, there was danger there. It was thinking of the past that drove him to the bottle. He was just going to have to accept the present.”

— Richard Matheson

97. “Never bear a grudge, old fellow. If a stranger starts to rile you, kill him right away. That way you get it out of your blood, so to speak, and are not poisoned.”

— Richard Matheson

98. “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

99. “Even though they fought, their fighting never turned them against each other. It always ended with them embracing and kissing, smiling, laughing.”

— Richard Matheson

100. “He hungered for peace and there was no peace. Terror was his only food.”

— Richard Matheson