Everyone has something to hide. And if they couldn't hide it the world would be in a lot worse mess than it is.
I couldn't tell you, Robert, what the higher ramifications are of being soul mates. I can tell you this however. As long as you are separated from your own, that long are you troubled. No matter what the circumstances, no matter how exquisite the environment in which you find yourself. To be half.
Heaven would never be heaven without you.
And suddenly he thought, I'm the abnormal one now. Normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man.
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...
People are not punished for their deeds, but by them.
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.
But it's so hard to make things simple and so easy to make them complicated.
Such thoughts were a hideous testimony to the world he had accepted; a world in which murder was easier than hope.
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?
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.
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.
I could never write about strange kingdoms. I could never do 'Harry Potter' or anything like that. Even when I did science-fiction, I didn't write about foreign planets and distant futures. I certainly never did fantasies about trolls living under bridges.
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.
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.
Everything seemed to flood over him then. It was as though he'd been the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, refusing to let the sea of reason in.
I wrote about real people and real circumstances and real neighborhoods. There was no crypt or castles or H.P. Lovecraft-type environments. They were just about normal people who had something bizarre happening to them in the neighborhood.
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.
I looked at all the people, feeling sorry for them. They were still subordinate to clock and calendar. Absolved of that, I stood becalmed.
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.
What is the atomic bomb? queried Leslie, But a mass of tortured Elements suffering complete nervous breakdown?
The keynote of minority prejudice is this: They are loathed because they are feared.
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.
Everyone has a secret place in his mind. Otherwise relationships would be impossible.
I wish I were a boy again-unquestioning, with no need to analyze the moment.
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.
At home he found the same threats waiting for him. He unlocked the door and stepped into the trap he had formed around him.
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.
Was there a logical answer, something he could accept without slipping on banana skins of mysticism?
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?
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.
And, before science had caught up with the legend, the legend had swallowed science and everything.
I had to write about realistic circumstances. That's the way my brain works. And I think that gave me a sort of place in the field.
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.
What dreams you white-frocked kiddies have in the sanctified cloister of your laboratories. You can make yourself believe anything after a while. As long as you can make up a measurement for it.
The foraging for food and water, the struggle for life in a world without masters, housed in a body that man had made dependent on himself.
All of us have a path to follow and the path begins on earth.
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?
The strength of the vampire is that no one will believe in him.
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.
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.
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.
'I Am Legend' is quite unusual for its time. I just wanted to write a story about female boxers, and I couldn't get that going in my mind. I don't know exactly where the idea of just a man pitting himself against a robot boxer came from.
That which you believe becomes your world.
Miniture protoplasm, the dirty little bastard!
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.
Here we are, kiddies, sitting like a bug in a rug, snugly, surrounded by a battalion of bloodsuckers who wish no more than to sip freely of my bonded, 100 proof hemoglobin. Have a drink, men, this one's really on me.
As he stepped into the sunlight, he heard the seals barking loudly. They must have an audience. Slick glory seekers. Whiskered prima donnas.
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.
