The Veldt

Too much of anything isn’t good for anyone.

Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else. When you were two years old you were shooting people with toy guns.

I don’t want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is there to do?

The house was full of dead bodies, it seemed. It felt like a mechanical cemetery. So silent. None of the humming hidden energy of machines waiting to function at the tap of a button.

Nothing ever likes to die — even a room.

I don't want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is there to do?

My dear George, a psychologist never saw a fact in his life. He only hears about feelings; vague things. This doesn’t feel good, I tell you. Trust my hunches and my instincts. I have a nose for something bad. This is very bad. My advice to you is to have the whole damn room torn down and your children brought to me every day during the next year for treatment.

Ithought that's why we bought this house, so we wouldn't have to do anything?" "That's just it. I feel like I don't belong here." (p.13)

And here were the lions now, fifteen feet away, so real, so feverishly and startlingly real that you could feel the prickling fur on your hand, and your mouth was stuffed with the dusty upholstery smell of their heated pelts, and the yellow of them was in your eyes like the yellow of an exquisite French tapestry, the yellows of lions and summer grass, and the sound of the matted lion lungs exhaling on the silent noontide, and the smell of meat from the panting, dripping mouths.

You’ll have to change your life. Like too many others, you’ve built it around creature comforts.