2nd most-quoted character in The Twilight Zone (1959): in 144 of its 373 quotes
Lines by Rod Serling 135
Rod Serling
Adam Grant, a nondescript kind of man found guilty of murder and sentenced to the electric chair. Like every other criminal caught in the wheels of justice, he's scared, right down to the marrow of his bones. But it isn't prison that scares him, the long silent nights of waiting, the slow walk to the little room or even death itself. It's something else that holds Adam Grant in the hot, sweaty grip of fear. Something worse than any punishment this world has to offer. Something found only in the Twilight Zone.
Wintry February night, the present. Order of events: a phone call from a frightened woman notating the arrival of an unidentified flying object, then the checkout you've just witnessed, with two state troopers verifying the event – but with nothing more enlightening to add beyond evidence of some tracks leading across the highway to a diner. You've heard of trying to find a needle in a haystack? Well, stay with us now, and you'll be part of an investigating team whose mission is not to find that proverbial needle. No, their task is even harder. They've got to find a Martian in a diner, and in just a moment you'll search with them, because you've just landed in the Twilight Zone.
What you're about to watch is a nightmare. It is not meant to be prophetic, it need not happen. It's the fervent and urgent prayer of all men of good will that it never shall happen. But in this place, in this moment, it does happen. This is the Twilight Zone.
No moral, no message, no prophetic tract. Just a simple statement of fact. For civilization to survive, the human race has to remain civilized. Tonight's very small exercise in logic from the Twilight Zone.
No comment here. No comment at all. We only wanted to introduce to one of our very special citizens: little Anthony Fremont, age six, who lives in a village called Peaksville in a place that used to be Ohio. And if by some strange chance you should run across him, you had best think only good thoughts. Anything less than that is handled at your own risk. Because if you do meet Anthony, you can be sure of one thing - you have entered the Twilight Zone.
Mr. Schmidt, recently arrived in a small Bavarian village which lies eight miles northwest of Munich. A picturesque, delightful little spot one time known for its scenery, but more recently related to other events having to do with some of the less positive pursuits of man: human slaughter, torture, misery and anguish. Mr. Schmidt, as we will soon perceive, has a vested interest in the ruins of a concentration camp. For once, some seventeen years ago, his name was Gunther Lutze. He held the rank of a captain in the SS. He was a black-uniformed strutting animal whose function in life was to give pain. And like his colleagues at the time, he shared the one affliction most common amongst that breed known as Nazis: he walked the earth without a heart. And now former SS captain Lutze will revisit his old haunts, satisfied perhaps that all that is awaiting him in the ruins on the hill is an element of nostalgia. What he does not know of course is that a place like Dachau cannot exist only in Bavaria. By its nature, by its very nature, it must be one of the populated areas of the Twilight Zone.
An old woman living in a nightmare, an old woman who has fought a thousand battles with death and always won. Now she's faced with a grim decision - whether or not to open a door. And in some strange and frightening way she knows that this seemingly ordinary door leads to the Twilight Zone.
What you have just looked at takes place three hundred feet underground, beneath the basement of a New York City skyscraper. It's owned and lived in by one Paul Radin. Mr. Radin is rich, eccentric and single-minded. How rich we can already perceive. How eccentric and single-minded we shall see in a moment, because all of you have just entered the Twilight Zone.
Some one-hundred-odd years ago, a motley collection of tough mustaches galloped across the West and left behind a raft of legends and legerdemains. And it seems a reasonable conjecture that if there are any television sets up in cowboy heaven, and any one of these rough-and-woolly nail-eaters could see with what careless abandon their names and exploits are being bandied about, they're very likely turning over in their graves - or worse, getting out of them. Which gives you a clue as to the proceedings that'll begin in just a moment, when one Mr. Rance McGrew, a three-thousand-buck-a-week phony-baloney discovers that this week's current edition of make-believe is being shot on location - and that location is The Twilight Zone.
The evolution of the so-called 'adult' western, and the metamorphosis of one Rance McGrew, formerly phony-baloney, now upright citizen with a preoccupation with all things involving tradition, truth, and cowpoke predecessors. It's the way the cookie crumbles and the six-gun shoots - in The Twilight Zone.
Respectfully submitted for your perusal – a Kanamit. Height: a little over nine feet. Weight: in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty pounds. Origin: unknown. Motives? Therein hangs the tale, for in just a moment, we're going to ask you to shake hands, figuratively, with a Christopher Columbus from another galaxy and another time. This is the Twilight Zone.
Cameo of a man who has just lost his most valuable possession. He doesn't know about the loss, yet. In fact, he doesn't even know about the possession. Because, like most people, David Gurney has never really thought about the matter of his identity. But he's going to be thinking a great deal about it from now on, because that is what he's lost. And his search for it is going to take him into the darkest corners - of The Twilight Zone.
A case of mistaken identity or a nightmare turned inside out? A simple loss of memory or the end of the world? David Gurney may never find the answer, but you can be sure he's looking for it - in the Twilight Zone.
The time is the space age. The place is a barren landscape of a rock-walled canyon that lies millions of miles from the planet Earth. The cast of characters, you've met them: William Fletcher, commander of the spaceship, his co-pilot Peter Craig. The other characters who inhabit this place, you may never see, but they're there, as these two gentlemen will soon find out because they're about to partake in a little exploration into that gray, shaded area in space and time that's known as the Twilight Zone.
The case of navigator Peter Craig, a victim of a delusion. In this case, the dream dies a little harder than the man. A small exercise in space psychology that you can try on for size in the Twilight Zone.
The Twilight Zone (1959) · 373 quotes
Rod Serling
