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,...

The Thing”)

There seemed no answer. He wasn’t resigned to anything, he hadn’t accepted or adjusted to the life he’d been forced into. Yet here he was, eight months after the plague’s last victim, nine since he’s...

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

She sounded angry. That was the way she’d been as long as he’d known her. If she became ill, it irritated her. She was annoyed by sickness. She seemed to regard it as a personal...

Shall I kill her now? Shall I not even investigate, but kill her and burn her?His throat moved. Such thoughts were a hideous testimony to the world he had accepted; a world in which murder...

…Those who’ve marred their appearance in any way by their actions in life aren’t forced to witness that marring. If they were, they’d become self-conscious and be unable to concentrate on improving themselves.

Miniture protoplasm, the dirty little bastard!

Let this hell be our heaven.

Heaven would never be heaven without you.

Disappearing Act”)

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

He took the woman from her bed, pretending not to notice the question posed in his mind: Why do you always experiment on women? He didn’t care to admit that the inference had any validity....

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...

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.

Advance Notice”)

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.

After a while, though, even the deepest sorrow faltered, even the most penetrating despair lost its scalpel edge.

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.

What would a Mohammedan vampire do if faced with a cross?

Mad House”)

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

All of us have a path to follow and the path begins on earth.

Each memory was brought to life before me and within me. I could not avoid them. Neither could I rationalize, explain away. I could only re-experience with total cognizance, unprotected by pretense. Self delusion was...

…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...

Very well then! I’ll write, write write. He let the words soak into his mind and displace all else.A man had a choice, after all. He devoted his life to his work or to his...

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...

How shall I typify what happened? Passion play? Somewhat. Weird tale? Indubitably. Horror story? Pretty close. Grotesque melodrama? Certainly. Black comedy? Your point of view will determine that. Perhaps it was a combination of them...

Now when I die, I shall only be dead.

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.

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...

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,...

Lover When You’re Near Me”)

Death Ship”)

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

The Disinheritors”)

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

Yet, despite all, it is a difficult thing to admit the existence of ghosts in a coldly factual world. One’s very instincts rebel at the admission of such maddening possibility. For, once the initial step...

Not only did I rediscover every experience of my life, I had to live each unfulfilled desire as well—as though they’d been fulfilled. I saw that what transpires in the mind is just as real...

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 are his needs any more shocking than the needs of any other animals and men? Are his deeds more outrageous than the deeds of the parent who drained the spirit from his child? The...

horror” had become obsolete. A surfeiting of terror made terror a cliché. To Robert Neville the situation merely existed as natural fact. It had no adjectives.

…Not that it was unjust; not that the scales were forced out of balance. Where there had been good, it showed as clearly. Kindnesses, accomplishments, all those were present, too.

That which you believe becomes your world.

He kept thinking about Mary. What a fool he’d been to let her go. To think, with the thoughtless assurance of youth, that the world was replete with endless possibilities. He’d thought it a mistake...

Quiet is here and all in me. (“Dress of White Silk”)

He thought about that visionary lady. To die, he thought, never knowing the fierce joy and attendant comfort of a loved one’s embrace. To sink into that hideous coma, to sink then into death and,...

It was a high ceilinged room with tall, large-panes windows. Apart from the doorway was the desk where book had been checked out in days when books were still being checked out. He stood there...

Again he shook his head. 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...

She felt all right. Her heart was like a drum hanging from piano wire in her chest, slowly, slowly beaten. Her hands and feet were numb, not with cold but with a sultry torpor. Thoughts...