Novelists From The United States

"Emily: Well, when he's in port, it's actually very tiny – about as big as my hand. And he keeps it on his mantel, in a bottle. He showed it to me once when he came to visit."

"Knowledge alone is the being of Nature, Giving a soul to her manifold features, Lighting through paths of the primitive darkness, The footsteps of Truth and the vision of Song."

"If she but smile, the crystal calm shall break In music, sweeter than it ever gave, As when a breeze breathes o'er some sleeping lake, And laughs in every wave."

"Thunder-spasms the waking be Into Life from Apathy: Life, not Death, is in the gale, — Let the coming Doom prevail!"

"Yes, let the Angel blow! A peal from the parted heaven, The first of seven!— The warning, not yet the sign, of woe! That men arise And look about them with wakened eyes, Behold on their garments the dust and slime, Refrain, forbear, Accept the weight of a nobler care And take reproach from the fallen time!"

"Once let the Angel blow! — A peal from the parted heaven, The first of seven! For the time is come that was foretold So long ago! As the avalanche gathers, huge and cold, From the down of the harmless snow, The years and the ages gather and hang Till the day when the word is spoken: When they that dwell in the end of time Are smitten alike for the early crime, As the vials of wrath are broken!"

"All, wherein I have part, All that was loss or gain, Slips from the clasping heart, Breaks from the grasping brain. Lo, what is left? I am bare As a new-born soul, — I am naught: My deeds are dust in air, My words are ghosts of thought. I ride through the night alone, Detached from the life that seemed, And the best I have felt or known Is less than the least I dreamed."

"The hollows are heavy and dank With the steam of the Goldenrods."

"No visitors shall yonder valley find. Except the spirits of the rain and wind: Here you must bide, my friends, with me entombed In this dim crypt, where shelved around us lie The mummied authors."

"Peace the offspring is of Power."

"Sleep, soldiers! still in honored rest Your truth and valor wearing: The bravest are the tenderest,— The loving are the daring."

"They sang of love, and not of fame; Forgot was Britain's glory; Each heart recalled a different name, But all sang Annie Lawrie."

"From the Desert I come to thee On a stallion shod with fire; And the winds are left behind In the speed of my desire. Under thy window I stand, And the midnight hears my cry: I love thee, I love but thee, With a love that shall not die Till the sun grows cold, And the stars are old, And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold!"

"Hard, withering toil only can achieve a name; and long days, and months, and years, must be passed in the chase of that bubble—reputation; which once grasped, breaks in your eager clutch, into a hundred lesser bubbles, that soar above you still!"

"But courage, and patience, and faith, and hope have their limit. Blessed be the man who escapes such trial as will determine limit! To a lone man it comes not near; for how can trial take hold where there is nothing by which to try? A funeral? You reason with philosophy. A grave yard? You read Hervey and muse upon the wall. A friend dies? You sigh, you pat your dog,—it is over. Losses? You retrench—you light your pipe—it is forgotten. Calumny? You laugh—you sleep. But with that childless wife clinging to you in love and sorrow—what then? Can you take down now, and coolly blow the dust from the leaf-tops? Can you crimp your lip with ? Can you smoke idly, your feet dangling with the ivies, your thoughts all waving fancies upon a church-yard wall—a wall that borders the grave of your boy? Can you amuse yourself by turning stinging into rhyme? Can you pat your dog, and seeing him wakeful and kind, say, "it is enough?" Can you sneer at calumny, and sit by your fire dozing?"

"The attempt to better one's condition is always praiseworthy; but it is only base and ignoble to attempt to cover one's condition with an idle smack of something larger."

"It is certain that by a special dispensation of Providence in favor of those who make up the bulk of the human family, a man may secure a simple livelihood in agricultural pursuits, with less of energy, less of promptitude, less of calculation, and greater unthrift generally, than would be compatible with even this scanty aim, in any other calling of life."

"I find no man so disagreeable to meet with, as one who knows everything. Of course we expect it in newspaper editors, and allow for it. But, to meet a man engaged in innocent occupations—over your fence, who is armed cap-a-pie against all new ideas,—who 'knew it afore,' or 'has heerd so,' or doubts it, or replies to your most truthful sally 't'ain't so, nuther,' is aggravating in the extreme."

"I have no faith in cats: they are a cold-blooded race; they are the politicians among domestic animals; they care little who is master, or what are the over-turnings, so their pickings are secure; and what are their midnight caucuses but primary meetings?"

"But wealth is a great means of refinement; and it is a security for gentleness, since it removes disturbing anxieties; and it is a pretty promoter of intelligence, since it multiplies the avenues for its reception; and it is a good basis for a generous habit of life; it even equips beauty, neither hardening its hand with toil, nor tempting the wrinkles to come early."

"Coquetry whets the appetite; flirtation depraves it. Coquetry is the thorn that guards the rose—easily trimmed off when once plucked. Flirtation is like the slime on water-plants, making them hard to handle, and when caught, only to be cherished in slimy waters."

"They think of suicide as a quick route to oblivion, an escape. Far from it...It merely alters a person from one form to another. Nothing can destroy the spirit. Suicide only precipitates a darker continuation of the same conditions from which escape was sought. A condition under circumstances so much more painful."

"I had written a short story, which I basically had ripped off from a Richard Matheson novel called I Am Legend."

"While Mr. Matheson's name is not as recognizable as that of Mr. King, perhaps no author living is as responsible for chilling a generation with tantalizing nightmare visions born of Golden Age television. Together with Rod Serling, Mr. Matheson wrote many of the classic Twilight Zone episodes for the original CBS series, including "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," "Little Girl Lost" and "Third From the Sun.""

"I think the author who influenced me the most as a writer was Richard Matheson. Books like I Am Legend were an inspiration to me."

"He has many … virtues, notably an unusual agility in trick prose and trick construction and a too-little-recognized (or exercised) skill on offtrail humor; but his great strength is his power to take a reader inside a character or a situation."

"Matheson gets closer to his characters than anyone else in the field of fantasy today. ... You don’t read a Matheson story — you experience it."

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

"To me, I don't even think of life after death. To me, life after death and reincarnation are just slices of the pie. Life is a huge wheel and it goes around and around, and life after death is just a segment of that. It comes down to spiritual growth. I think that we keep coming back until we learn what we need to learn, until we get it right. I think we've all lived hundreds, maybe thousands of times. That which you think becomes your world. It's only when we're alive and in this world that we have the chance to progress. From the state of the world today, we haven't made much progress."

"All through the years, I've had many interests. I always wanted to write a swashbuckler; I still do. I love Westerns. I wrote a western called "Journal of the Gun Years," which won the Golden Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. It had been written some time ago and rejected by every publisher, perhaps because I had been cast in the science fiction mold. I finished writing a combination western and horror story indigenous to the period. And horror takes many forms: Indians had their own superstitions based on things that they didn't understand. In a way, I like to be confusing by combining genres. I've always been fascinated by parapsychology, and I think that we've all lived before. In "The Path" I've explored that and a few other age-old questions like why are we here and what's our purpose in life."

"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've always considered myself an offbeat writer. Out here in California they like to categorize, so I'm a science fiction writer. I wrote science fiction to break into the writing business. My love is fantasy. I wrote one of my early novels in four days sitting in a closet which I'd converted into an office, using an old Smith-Corona that my parents had given me for Christmas when I was 12."

"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."

"I've been very fortunate throughout my career. And I've been lucky enough to have worked with some great and talented people, like Price and Serling. I was just a part of the whole phenomenon coming together. They were exciting times that bubbled over with energy for all those involved."

"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."

"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.""

"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 the end of their lives."

"What condemnation could possibly be more harsh than one's own when self-pretense is no longer possible?"

"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."

"Let this hell be our heaven."

"Thank you...for gracing my life with your lovely presence, for adding the sweet measure of your soul to my existence."

"Heaven would never be heaven without you."

"What does that motto on the wall of your office say? That which you believe becomes your world."

"I will try to be consistent, no longer oscillating like some planet that has lost its way. For, at long last, I have found my sun."

"I wish I were a boy again—unquestioning, with no need to analyze the moment. I had that feeling when I first stared at her photograph; I was emotionally overwhelmed. Now reality impinges. I’m pulled in two directions simultaneously—toward yearning and toward reason. It’s at times like this I hate the brain. It always builds more barriers than it can topple."

"Maurice Nicoll says all history is a living today. We are not enjoying one spark of life in a huge, dead waste. We are, instead, existing at one point "in a vast process of the living who still think and feel but are invisible to us.""

"To the human eye, stars move very slowly. Considering their relative motion, at this moment she and I might be looking up at virtually the same sight. She in 1896, me in 1971."

"Well, why not? My dream woman has always been unavailable to me. What difference does a mere three-quarters of a century make?"

"I looked at all the people, feeling sorry for them. They were still subordinate to clock and calendar. Absolved of that, I stood becalmed."

"Robert Neville looked out over the new people of the earth. He knew he did not belong to them; he knew that, like the vampires, he was anathema and black terror to be destroyed. And, abruptly, the concept came, amusing to him even in his pain. ... Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend."