Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies
42 quotes
"There's no benchmark for how life's "supposed" to happen. There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, it's up to you how you respond to it."
"Your dreamers. You ridiculous children. You dancing grinning fuckups. Here is your bright future. Your earnest, saccharine hope. How does it taste dripping from the neck of everyone you love?"
"My friend "M" says the irony of being a zombie is that everything is funny, but you can't smile, because your lips have rotted off."
"Why is it beautiful that humanity keeps coming back? So does herpes."
"The darkness of the room is pulsing with gunfire, and by our standards we are grossly outnumbered - there are only three of us to every one of them - but something is tipping things in our favor. Our manic speed is uncharacteristic of the Dead, and our prey are not prepared for it. Is this all coming from me? Creatures without desire usually don't move quickly, but they're following my lead, and I am an angry whirlwind."
"What's wrong with people?" she says, almost too quiet for me to hear. "Were they born with parts missing or did it fall out somewhere along the way?"
"It frustrates and fascinates me that we'll never know for sure, that despite the best efforts of historians and scientists and poets, there are some things we'll just never know. What the first song sounded like. How it felt to see the first photograph. Who kissed the first kiss, and if it was any good."
"Music? Music is life! It’s physical emotion - you can touch it! It’s neon ecto-energy sucked out of spirits and switched into sound waves for your ears to swallow. Are you telling me, what, that it’s boring? You don’t have time for it?"
"In the darkest and strangest of places with the most macabre of company, this music moves her and her life pulses hard... And even for Julie's safety, I can't bring myself to smother it."
"I don't know what happened. Disease? War? Social collapse? Or was it just us? The Dead replacing the Living? I guess it's not so important. Once you've arrived at the end of the world, it hardly matters which route you took."
"You won’t starve, R. In my short life I made so many choices just because I thought they were required, but my dad was right: there’s no rule book for the world. It’s in our heads, our collective human hive-mind. If there are rules, we’re the ones making them. We can change them whenever we want to."
"I mean obviously, staying alive is pretty fucking important . . . but there’s got to be something beyond that, right?"
"That's why we have memory. And the opposite of memory— hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can built off our pasts and make future."
"I try to think of things to say but nothing comes, and if something did come I probably couldn't say it. This is my great obstacle, the biggest of all the boulders littering my path. In my mind I am eloquent; I can climb intricate scaffolds of words to reach the highest cathedral ceilings and paint my thoughts. But when I open my mouth, it all collapses."
"I wish I could read what she's written there. Instead, I pretend the letters are stars. The words, constellations."
"We will cry and bleed and lust and love, and we will cure death. We will be the cure. Because we want it."
"...thinking all this maximalism would somehow generate happiness?"
"Of course, if I eat all of him, if I spare his brain, he'll rise up and follow me back to the airport, and that might make feel better. I'll introduce him to everyone, and maybe we'll stand around and groan for a while. It's hard to say what 'friends' are any more, but that might be close."
"You should always be taking pictures, if not with a camera then with your mind. Memories you capture on purpose are always more vivid than the ones you pick up by accident."
"So if existence was just binary, dead or alive, here or not here, what would be the fucking point in anything? My mom used to say that's why we have memory. And the opposite of memory--hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can build off our pasts and make futures."
"My mom used to say that’s why we have memory. And the opposite of memory—hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can build off our pasts and make futures."
"Well we have to. We have to remember everything. If we don’t, by the time we grow up it’ll be gone forever."
"You and I are victims of the same disease. We're fighting the same war, just different battles in different theaters, and it's way too late for me to hate you for anything, because we're the same damn thing. My soul, your conscience, whatever's left of me woven into whatever's left of you, all tangled up and conjoined. We're in this together, corpse."
"I should stitch my mouth shut. Honesty is a compulsion that’s damned me more than once. But I just can’t hold it in anymore. The words build and explode out of me like an uncontainable sneeze."
"Was it just fear? the voices wonder. We were fearful in the best of times; how could we cope with the worst? So we found the tallest walls and poured ourselves behind them. We kept pouring until we were biggest and strongest, elected the greatest generals and found the most weapons, thinking all this maximalism would somehow generate happiness. But nothing so obvious could ever work."