She wanted nothing that he could offer her, except perhaps his absence.

Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.

How many human eyes...had snatched glimpses of their secret anatomies, down the passage of years?

Behind their eyes the hope was sickening and in many, dead. They lived from event to event with a subtle terror of the gap between, filling up their lives with distractions to avoid the emptiness where curiosity should have been.

We burn so hard, but we shed so little light; it makes us crazy and sad.

We're both thieves, Harvey Swick. I take time. You take lives. But in the end we're the same: both Thieves of Always.

Richard Christian Matheson is a master of compression. He knows how to catch a moment in words and convey it straight to the reader's heart.