Top 140 Richard Matheson Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The agony of being earthbound can be indescribable. I’m sure the memory still haunts.”

— Richard Matheson

102. “Goddamn your bones, that is the first step.”

— Richard Matheson

103. “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

104. “Toward the end of the plague, yellow journalism had spread a cancerous dread of vampires to all corners of the nation. He could remember himself the rash of pseudo-scientific articles that veiled an out-and-out fright campaign designed to sell papers. There was something grotesquely amusing in that; the frenetic attempt to sell papers while the world died. Not that all newspapers had done that. Those papers that had lived in honesty and integrity died the same way.”

— Richard Matheson

105. “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

106. “I had to write about realistic circumstances. Thats the way my brain works. And I think that gave me a sort of place in the field.”

— Richard Matheson

107. “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.”

— Richard Matheson

108. “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

109. “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

110. “They spoke, at length, about the realms “above” this one. Levels at which the progressing soul becomes at one with God – formless, independent of time and substance though still aware of personal identity.”

— Richard Matheson

111. “They sat there in the evening of the last day. And, though there was no actual point to it, they loved each other.”

— Richard Matheson

112. “When matter is put aside, all creation becomes exclusively mental, that’s all.”

— Richard Matheson

113. “Of only one thing I am certain. If the manuscript is true, all of us had better examine our lives. Carefully.”

— Richard Matheson

114. “There were no servants to maintain the house; they were indistinguishable from the guests by then.”

— Richard Matheson

115. “And this knowledge you say you’ve acquired – are you conscious of an increase in it since your ill-fated visit to the library?” Fed nodded. “I know more than ever.”

— Richard Matheson

116. “Accordingly, Mr. Cook spent four years, six months, two days, $5,228.20, six thousand yards of wiring, three hundred and two radio tubes, a generator, reams of paper, dizzying mentation and the good will of his wife in assembling his duplication machine.”

— Richard Matheson

117. “I’d been in the densest part of the earth’s aura he told me, an aqueous region which was the source of myths about the waters of Lethe, the River Styx.”

— Richard Matheson

118. “They said he used to cackle and bark in his crib after dark. They said he walked at two months and sat staring at the moon whenever it shone. Those were things that people said. His parents were always worried about him. An only child, they noticed his flaws quickly. They thought he was blind until the doctor told them it was just a vacuous stare.”

— Richard Matheson

119. “Tell ya the man’s got a private line t’Moscow,” he said. “A few men like that in office and we’re in for it, take my word.”

— Richard Matheson

120. “There were still many things to learn, but not so many as before.”

— Richard Matheson

121. “Literally, it was inconceivable to us; as though, by divorcing, we would voluntarily permit ourselves to be torn in half.”

— Richard Matheson

122. “What did it matter what he did? Life would be equally purposeless no matter what his decision was.”

— Richard Matheson

123. “The gift?” “An ability to utilize the etheric sense despite their encapsulation in the physical body.”

— Richard Matheson

124. “They were completely devoted to each other. Except for us children, they seemed to have need for no one but each other. Not that they didn’t see people. People liked them and wanted to see them, you know that; they were great friends with your Mom and Dad. But togetherness meant more to them than anything.”

— Richard Matheson

125. “Cornered again, Mr. Cook reluctantly made a third duplicate; then a fourth, a fifth. The city, albeit large, soon became thick with William O. Cooks. He would come upon himself at corners, discover himself asking himself for lights, end up, quite literally, beside himself.”

— Richard Matheson

126. “I think I know the secret of Hell House, Ben.” Fischer didn’t speak for almost half a minute. “Do you?” he asked then. “It’s Belasco.” “How?” “He safeguards the haunting of his house by reinforcing it,” she said. “By acting as a hidden aide for every other haunting force.”

— Richard Matheson

127. “Stewardess!” She came running down the aisle, her face tightened with alarm. When she saw the look on his face, she stiffened in her tracks. “There’s a man out there! A man!” cried Wilson. “What?” Skin constricted on her cheeks, around her eyes. “Look, look!” Hand shaking, Wilson dropped back into his seat and pointed out the window. “He’s crawling on the – ” The words ended with a choking rattle in his throat. There was nothing on the wing.”

— Richard Matheson

128. “Did you know, Robert, that, in extreme unction, the seven centers of the body – covering the vital organs – are anointed to assist the dying person to withdraw vitality from those organs in preparation for complete withdrawal through the silver cord? And absolution of the dead was established to make certain that the silver cord is severed and all etheric matter withdrawn from the body.”

— Richard Matheson

129. “He was getting disgusted at this increasing nostalgic preoccupation with the past. It was a weakness, he knew, a weakness he could scarcely afford if he intended to go on. And yet he kept discovering himself drifting into extensive meditation on aspects of the past. It was almost more than he could control, and it was making him furious with himself.”

— Richard Matheson

130. “With words I have knit my shroud and will bury myself therein.”

— Richard Matheson

131. “Anyone who couldn’t understand that what’s important is a man’s soul, not the color of his skin, would never be content here.”

— Richard Matheson

132. “Unless the health authorities say schools have to shut down, I don’t see why we should keep her home. She’s not sick.”

— Richard Matheson

133. “Still alive, he thought, heart beating senselessly, veins running without point, bones and muscles and tissue all alive and functioning with no purpose at all.”

— Richard Matheson

134. “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

135. “Thinking about it, he almost forgot that nightfall was approaching. With a start he looked up and saw Ben Cortman running at him from across the street. “Neville!” He jumped up from the porch and ran into the house, locking and bolting the door behind him with shaking hands.”

— Richard Matheson

136. “No snow or sleet. What about people who like snow? This wouldn’t be heaven to them.”

— Richard Matheson

137. “He was out hunting for Cortman. It had become a relaxing hobby, hunting for Cortman; one of the few diversions left to him.”

— Richard Matheson

138. “Each man’s life is a tome of episodes. Consider all the moments of your life enumerated one by one with full description.”

— Richard Matheson

139. “That’s my job; to bring adventure into your life.”

— Richard Matheson

140. “Rather than go on suffering, he had learned to stultify himself to introspection. Time had lost its multidimensional scope. There was only the present for Robert Neville; a present based on day-to-day survival marked by neither heights of joy nor depths of despair. I am predominantly vegetable, he often thought to himself. That was the way he wanted it.”

— Richard Matheson

141. “At home he found the same threats waiting for him. He unlocked the door and stepped into the trap he had formed around him.”

— Richard Matheson

142. “And he wonders, deep in the self-isolated recesses of his mind whether he is killing himself with anger, whether he is destroying his system with fury.”

— Richard Matheson

143. “Silence held him in its cold and gentle hands.”

— Richard Matheson

144. “All this time I have been telling myself that the skills I have to offer continue to be of value. Now I wonder if this is so. It may be that the day of the so-called “gunfighter” is on the wane. That soon it will be little more than the memory of a brief period in time when masters of the handgun ruled the frontier. A living dead man. That is what I have been for some time now.”

— Richard Matheson

145. “Morality fell with society.”

— Richard Matheson

146. “The atmosphere in here –.”

— Richard Matheson

147. “All without knowing what it was to love and be loved. That was a tragedy more terrible than becoming a vampire.”

— Richard Matheson