Frasi di Richard Matheson

pagina 2

“Tempo, fammi un ultimo favore. Fermati su questo momento sublime, in maniera che io possa viverlo per sempre.”

“[…] Se servisse a contribuire realmente alla pace nel mondo, sareste disposti a camminare per le strade di Broadway, a New York…nudi?
L'idea che ha portato alla stesura di The Box è di natura simile: il sacrificio della dignità umana in cambio di un preciso scopo. Ma in questo caso nulla che somigli neppure vagamente a qualcosa di nobile come la pace nel mondo.”

“Morire, senza conoscere la gioia intensa e il relativo conforto dell'abbraccio di chi si ama. Affondare in quel coma orrendo, poi nella morte, e forse tornare per compiere vagabondaggi sterili, spaventosi. Senza sapere cosa significasse amare ed essere amati. Una tragedia che superava quella di trasformarsi in vampiro.”

“Qualche volta aveva indugiato nel sogno a occhi aperti di incontrare qualcuno. Più spesso, però, aveva cercato di adattarsi a ciò che gli pareva sinceramente inevitabile: l'idea di essere rimasto solo al mondo. Almeno nella porzione di mondo che poteva sapere di conoscere.”

“Il tempo aveva perso la sua qualità pluridimensionale. Per Robert Neville esisteva soltanto il presente; un presente basato sulla sopravvivenza quotidiana, scandito dall'assenza di picchi di gioia o abissi di disperazione. Sono a un passo dallo stato vegetale, pensava spesso.”

“Ora sono io l'anormale. La Normalità è un concetto di maggioranza, la norma di molti, e non la norma di uno solo.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“In a world of monotonous horror
there could be no salvation in wild dreaming.”

“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.”

“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.”

“When you sleep, your dream world is as real to you as life, isn’t it?”

“Normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man.”

“How
long did it take for a past to die?”

“The vampire was real. It was only that his true story had never been told.”

“Everyone has something to hide. And if they couldn't hide it the world would be in a lot worse mess than it is.”

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

“When I first joined my local library, I read endlessly. I immediately headed for the fantasy section, fairy tales, you name it. As a teen-ager, I read every novel by Kenneth Roberts, who wrote historical novels about the Revolutionary War period. My mother used to read to me. Heidi was one of my childhood favorites.”

“It is a secret but I have pulled the chain out of the wall. I can see out the little window all I like.”

“I can get pissed off very easily.”

“Life is a risk; so is writing. You have to love it.”

“The world’s gone mad, he thought. The dead walk about and I think nothing of it.
The return of corpses has become trivial in import. How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it.”

“Somewhere In Time is the story of a love which transcends time, What Dreams May Come is the story of a love which transcends death. … I feel that they represent the best writing I have done in the novel form.”

“George Romero filmed an homage to the book, and he called it Night of the Living Dead. Homage means I can make the picture and I don't have to pay you for your book. As a teen-ager I saw the movie "Dracula," and it occurred to me that if one vampire was scary, a whole world populated by vampires would be really scary.”

“I thought what father said. Oh god he said. And only eight.”

“A woman. Alive. In the daylight.
He stood, mouth partly open, gaping at the woman. She was young, he could see now as she came closer; probably in her twenties. She wore a wrinkled and dirty white dress. She was very tan, her hair was red. In the dead silence of the afternoon Neville thought he heard the crunch of her shoes in the long grass.
I’ve gone mad. The words presented themselves abruptly. He felt less shock at that possibility than he did at the notion that she was real. He had, in fact, been vaguely preparing himself for just such a delusion. It seemed feasible. The man who died of thirst saw mirages of lakes. Why shouldn’t a man who thirsted for companionship see a woman walking in the sun?”

“To his complete astonishment, he later found himself offering up a stumbling prayer that the dog would be protected. 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.”

“Sometimes he had indulged in daydreams about finding someone. More often, though, he had tried to adjust to what he sincerely believed was the inevitable — that he was actually the only one left in the world. At least in as much of the world as he could ever hope to know.”

“My wife and child and I were on a camping trip and we stopped in Virginia City. In the Opera House, I saw a photograph of Maude Adams, the famous American actress. It was such a great photograph that creatively I fell in love with her. What if some guy did the same thing and could go back in time?”

“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.”

“Despite everything he had or might have (except, of course, another human being), life gave no promise of improvement or even of change. The way things shaped up, he would live out his life with no more than he already had. And how many years was that? Thirty, maybe forty if he didn’t drink himself to death.
The thought of forty more years of living as he was made him shudder.”