Isaac Marion Quotations

Every experience, good or bad, is a priceless collector's item.

I adapt to things quickly, including good things, which I wish I could shut off sometimes. My friends have to keep reminding me how crazy my life has become, and then it hits me fresh and I just slap my forehead and think, "Wait, what... ?"

Sometimes it's a struggle to live in the moment.

Regret is pointless. I never do anything without first deciding to do it based on facts and feelings, and if it doesn't work out how I hoped, oh well - there's another notch on my experience belt.

I've always been interested in writing from the perspective of an outsider.

'Warm Bodies' ended up becoming one of the most personal relatable things I've written.

I used to split my time between writing, music and painting. I would work on a book and then abandon it, start a band, do an album, quit music, then do a gallery show. Eventually I decided to give writing a serious shot.

The kind of stuff I usually read is a bit more on the literary side, like books that I think are influential in the sense that they're doing pulpy subject matter in a refined way. Like 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy; I loved that book.

It's rare that I read more than two or three books by any one author; usually only one.

We are where we are, however we got here. What matters is where we go next.

There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, and it's up to you how you respond to it.

Writing isn't letters on paper. It's communication. It's memory.

It's hard to take your life so seriously when you can see it all at once.

One mistake, one brief lapse of my new found judgement-that's all it took to unravel everything. What a massive responsibility, being a moral creature.

I want life and in all its stupid sticky rawness.

Last winter, when so many Living joined the Dead and our prey became scarce, I watched some of my friends become full-dead. The transition was undramatic. They just slowed down, then stopped, and after a while I realised they were corpses. It disquieted me at first, but it’s against etiquette to notice when one of us dies. I distracted myself with some groaning.

She hugs me. It's tentative at first, a little scared, and yes, a little repulsed, but then she melts into it. She rests her head against my cold neck and embraces me. Unable to believer what's happening, I put my arm around her and just hold her. I almost swear I can feel my heart thumping. But it must just be hers, pressed tightly against my chest.

Once again the absurdity of my inner thoughts overwhelms me, and I want to crawl out of my skin, escape my ugly, awkward flesh and be a skeleton, naked and anonymous.

The shadows of the room pool in the lines of our faces, draining our eyes of hue. "There's nothing left worth saying.

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?

Every time I go to sleep, I know I may never wake up. How could anyone expect to? You drop your tiny, helpless mind into a bottomless well, crossing your fingers and hoping when you pull it out on its flimsy fishing wire it hasn't been gnawed to bones by nameless beasts below.

She gathers my half of the blankets around her and curls up against the wall. She will sleep for hours more, dreaming endless landscapes and novas of colour both gorgeous and frightening. If I stayed she would wake up and describe them to me. All the mad plot twists and surrealist imagery, so vivid to her while so meaningless to me. There was a time when I treasured listening to her, when I found the commotion in her soul bitter-sweet and lovely, but I can no longer bear it.

It was fun, but it's over now. This is how things go.

How do I appear unthreatening when her lover's blood is running down my chin?

In my palm I can feel the echo of her pulse, standing in for the absense of mine.

A month ago there was nothing on Earth I missed, enjoyed, or longed for. I knew I could lose everything and not feel anything, and I rested easy in that knowledge. But I'm growing tired of easy things.

I know I'm not going to say good-bye. And if these staggering refugees want to help, if they think they see something bigger here than a boy chasing a girl, then they can help, and we'll see what happens when we say yes while the rigor mortis world screams no.

No praise, no blame. Just so.

We will cry and bleed and lust and love, and we will cure death. We will be the cure. Because we want it.

It’s sad to see them staring wistfully through the window when the door isn’t locked.

All the shitty stuff people do to themselves... it can all be the same thing, you know? Just a way to drown out your own voice. To kill your memories without having to kill yourself.

When the entire world is built on death and horror, when existence is a constant state of panic, it's hard to get worked up about any one thing. Specific fears have become irrelevant. We've replace them with a smothering blanket far worse.

The world that birthed that story is long gone, all its people are dead, but it continues to touch the present and future because someone cared enough about that world to keep it. To put it in words. To remember it.

Just... ate," M says, frowning at me a little. "Two days...ago." I grab my stomach again. "Feel empty. Feel... dead." He nods. "Marr...iage.

There is a chasm between me and the world outside of me. A gap so wide my feelings can't cross it. By the time my screams reach the other side, they have dwindled into groans.

I think for a minute. Watching my wife fade into the distance, I put a hand on my heart. "Dead." I wave a hand toward my wife. "Dead." My eyes drift toward the sky and lose their focus. "Want it...to hurt. But...doesn't." Julie looks at me like she's waiting for more, and I wonder if I've expressed anything at all with my halting, mumbled soliloquy. Are my words ever actually audible, or do they just echo in my head while people stare at me, waiting? I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses.

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.

What a massive responsibility, being a moral creature

Here we are on the road. We must be going somewhere.

I can feel it... the chance to start over, to live right, to love right, to burn up in a fiery cloud and never again be buried in the mud.

What I'm saying is, when you have weight like that in your life, you have to start looking for the bigger picture or you are gonna sink.

What wonderful thing didn't start out scary?

I'm not a general or a colonel or a builder of cities. I'm just a corpse who wants not to be.

Not so easy, Mr Lennon. Even if you try.

If there are rules, we're the ones making them. We can change them whenever we want to.

I think the world has mostly ended because the cities we wander through are as rotten as we are. Buildings have collapsed. Rusted cars clog the streets. Most glass is shattered and the wind drifting through the hollow high-rises moans like an animal left to die. 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're arrived at the end of the world, it hardly matters which road you took.

What's the point of trying to fix a world we're so briefly in?

I am Dead, but it's not so bad. I've learned to live with it.

I sigh inside, so exhausted by these ugly questions, but when did a monster ever deserve its privacy?

I can no longer believe in any voodoo spell or laboratory virus. This is something deeper, darker. This comes from the cosmos, from the stars, or the unknown blackness behind them. The shadows in God's boarded-up basement.

...and we'll see what happens when we say Yes while this rigor mortis world screams No.

Are we all just Dark Age doctors, swearing by our leeches? We crave a greater science. We want to be proven wrong.

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.

Soft flesh is eaten by hard teeth.

But I'm not afraid of the skeletons in Julie's closet. I look forward to meeting the rest of them, looking them hard in the eye, giving them firm, bone-crunching handshakes.

Once you've arrived at the end of the world, it hardly matters which route you took.

Now I’m just standing here on the conveyor. Along for the ride. I reach the end, turn around, and go back the other way. The world has been distilled. Being dead is easy. After a few hours of this, I notice a female on the opposite conveyor. She doesn’t lurch or groan like most of us. Her head just lolls from side to side. I like that about her. That she doesn’t lurch or groan. I catch her eye and stare at her.

I crush her against me. I want to be part of her. Not just inside her but all around her. I want our rib cages to crack open and our hearts to migrate and merge. I want our cells to braid together like living thread.

I think we crushed ourselves down over the centuries. Buried ourselves under greed and hate and whatever other sins we could find until our souls finally hit the rock bottom of the universe. And then they scraped a hole through it, into some ... darker place.

Nothing is permanent. Not even the end of the world.

There’s not really such thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people, there’s just like…humanity. And it gets broken sometimes.

My favorite songs change every year.

It’s not about keeping up the population, it’s about passing on who we are and what we've learned, so things keep going. So we don’t just end.

The sports arena Julie calls home is unaccountably large, perhaps one of those dual-event 'super venues' built for an era when the greatest quandary facing the world was where to put all the parties.

My "heart". Does that pitiful organ still represent anything? It lies motionless in my chest, pumping no blood, serving no purpose, and yet my feelings still seem to originate inside its cold walls. My muted sadness, my vague longing, my rare flickers of joy. They pool in the center of my chest and seep out of there, diluted and faint, but real.

Stop. Breathe those useless breaths. Drop this piece of life you’re holding to your lips. Where are you? How long have you been here? Stop now. You have to stop. Squeeze shut your stinging eyes, and take another bite.

I feel an unfamiliar but pleasant sensation in my lips, tugging them upward. This is... new.

Breathing is optional, but I need some air.

Everything you see, you might be seeing for the last time.

Peel off these dusty wool blankets of apathy and antipathy and cynical desiccation. I want life in all its stupid sticky rawness.

All my life I have battled the alarm clock, pummeling the snooze button over and over with mounting self-loathing until the shame is finally strong enough to lever me upright.

Came to . . . see you.” “But I had to go home, remember? You were supposed to say good-bye.” “Don't know why you . . . say good-bye. I say . . . hello.” Her lip quivers between reactions, but she ends up with a reluctant smile. “God you're a cheeseball. But seriously, R—

He is spent. His mind is mercury again, its brief surge of humanity melting into an oily residue on its surface, and he no longer understands the feelings he felt in that strange moment on the overpass. But he did feel them. They did happen. They rest on the murky seabed of his mind, buried under sand and silt and miles of grey waves. Patient seeds waiting for light.

You might say that death has relaxed me.

We have to remember everything. If we don't, by the time we grow up it'll be gone forever.

Enough white lies can scorch the earth black.

Maybe this is why I sleep only a few hours a month. I don't want to die again. This has become clearer and clearer to me recently, a desire so sharp and focused I can hardly believe it's mine: I don't want to die. I don't want to disappear. I want to stay.

Life only makes any sense if we can see time how God does. Past, present, and future all at once.

Why is it beautiful that humanity keeps coming back? So does herpes.

I don't want to hear music, I don't want the sunrise to be pink. The world is a liar. Its ugliness is overwhelming; the scraps of beauty make it worse.

It's more eerie to be alone in a city that's lit up and functioning than one that's a tomb. If everything were silent, one could almost pretend to be in nature. A forest. A meadow. Crickets and birdsong. But the corpse of civilization is as restless as the creatures that now roam the graveyards.

We eat and sleep and shuffle through the fog, walking a marathon with no finish line, no medals, no cheering.

Even in my bravest moment, I am a coward.

You can order yourself to treasure a moment, to cling tight to a feeling and never let it fade, but it's your brain, that three-pound lump of hamburger, that makes the final call.

I can’t seem to make myself care about anything to the right or left of the present.

Are my words ever actually audible, or do they just echo in my head while people stare at me, waiting?

Sometimes I wonder if he has a philosophy. Maybe even a worldview. I'd like to sit down with him and pick his brain, just a tiny bit somewhere in the frontal lobe to get a taste of his thoughts. But he's too much of a toughguy to ever be that vulnerable. - R on M

Can we really choose anything?' 'Maybe. If we want to bad enough.

What happened? How did I get here? How could I have known that my choices mattered?

But we don’t remember those lives. We can’t read our diaries.’ ‘It doesn’t matter. We are where we are, however we got here. What matters is where we go next.’ ‘But can we choose that?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘We’re Dead. Can we really choose anything?’ ‘Maybe. If we want to bad enough.

I'm alone, stumbling through the city in the dark, trying not to let the night freeze my blood.

... we shoved out many hopes and fears into their hands, believing those hands were strong because they had firm handshakes. They failed us, always. There was no way they could not fail us - they were human, and so were we.

The moment the light went out, everyone stopped pretending.

...thinking all this maximalism would somehow generate happiness?

God has made us study partner. We need to talk about our project.

It's not like I'm such a shiny happy person either, you know? I'm a wreck too, I'm just... still alive.

I feel the flatline of my existence disrupting, forming heartbeat hills and valleys

We're fumbling in the dark, but at least we're in motion.

Here it comes. My inevitable death, ignoring me all those years when I wished for it daily, arriving only after I've decided I want to live forever.

What happened to the world was gradual. I've forgotten what it actually was, but I have faint, fetal memories of what it was like. A smoldering dread that never really caught fire till there wasn't much left to burn. Each sequential step surprised us. Then one day we woke up, and everything was gone.