“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, perhaps, return to sterile, awful wanderings. All without knowing what it was to love and be loved. That was a tragedy more terrible than becoming a vampire.”
“In a way we’re like a revolutionary group-repossessing society by violence. It’s inevitable. Violence is no stranger to you. You’ve killed. Many times.”
“That’s exactly why we’re killing... to survive. We can’t allow the dead to exist beside the living. Their brains are impaired, they exist for only one purpose. They have to be destroyed.”
“After the first few weeks of building up intense hope about the dog, it had slowly dawned on him that intense hope was not the answer and never had been. In a world of monotonous horror there could be no salvation in wild dreaming.”
“He felt himself trembling without control and he wanted to cry out loudly to stop the runaway horse of his brain. He had to find something! He raged in his mind. I won’t let it go!”
“He checked the oil, water, battery water, and tires. Everything was in good condition. It usually was, because he took special care of the car. If it ever broke down so that he couldn’t get back to the house by sunset... Well, there was no point in even worrying about that. If it ever happened, that was the end.”
“He was getting disgusted at this increasing nostalgic preoccupation with the past. It was a weakness, he knew, a weakness he could scarcely afford if he intended to go on.”
“He had wandered through the streets for hours, neither knowing nor caring where he was going. All he knew was that he couldn’t return to the empty rooms of the house, couldn’t look at the things they had touched and held and known with him.”
“In spite of having lived with death all these years, in spite of having walked a tightrope of bare existence across an endless maw of death- in spite of that he couldn’t understand it.”