Richard Matheson Quotes

You have an utterly sincere glance when you look around after you are shipwrecked. You weep a long time on an island when you realize what's happened to you.

I am nothing. I’m like someone who’s been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I call out, but no one answers. I have no connection to anything.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

And then when all around grows dark, when we feel utterly alone, when all men right and left pass us by and know us not, a forgotten feeling rises in the breast.

All of a sudden their husband's dead and maybe a child is dead and they have absolutely nothing - and they're heading through the desert at night.

The most terrifying thing I can think of is being alone - and I mean utterly alone, like no one else in the world alone - at night. That's the nucleus of the first story in my collection and it's also where the title came from for the book.

The dominant feeling of the battlefield is loneliness.

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.

Then black despair, The shadow of a starless night, was thrown Over the world in which I moved alone.

They held each other and wept as the night closed its fist around their tiny shelter, and the world below them seethed with killers both living and dead.

All right, then, I thought: here I am in the bottom of a well.

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more.

There are moments of despair that come sometimes, when night sets in and a white fog presses against the windows. Then our house changes its shape, rears up and becomes a place of despair. Then fear and rage run simply--and the thought of Death as a friend. This is the simplest of thoughts, that Death must come when we call, although he is a god.

Maybe I'll go where I can see stars, he said to himself as the car gained velocity and altitude; it headed away from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolation to the north. To the place where no living thing would go. Not unless it felt that the end had come.

Leave me in the night but please don't leave me in the dark

The lonely become either thoughtful or empty.

Christmas is a holiday that persecutes the lonely, the frayed, and the rejected.

But I also think all of the great stories in literature deal with loneliness. Sometimes it's by way of heartbreak, sometimes it's by way of injustice, sometimes it's by way of fate. There's an infinite number of ways to examine it.

When one by one our ties are torn, and friend from friend is snatched forlorn; when man is left alone to mourn, oh! then how sweet it is to die!

I really wanted to die at certain periods in my life.

I give the fight up: let there be an end, a privacy, an obscure nook for me. I want to be forgotten even by God.

I had never felt so lonely and so sad in my entire life.

There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.

You reach out your hand, but you're all alone, in those time passages.

I want to be alone and work until the day my heads hits the drawing table and I'm dead. Kaput. I feel very much like I want to be with my brother and sister again. They're nowhere. I know they're nowhere and they don't exist, but if nowhere means that's where they are, that's where I want to be.