Isaac Marion
No praise, no blame. Just so.Collection: Blame
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.Collection: World
I wince at her use of the word "human." I've never liked that differentiation. She is living and I'm dead, but we're both human. Call me an idealist.Collection: Use
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.Collection: Memories
It’s sad to see them staring wistfully through the window when the door isn’t locked.Collection: Doors
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.Collection: Skeletons
She is Living and I'm Dead, but I'd like to believe we're both human. Call me an idealist.Collection: Believe
It's not like I'm such a shiny happy person either, you know? I'm a wreck too, I'm just... still alive.Collection: Alive
Enough white lies can scorch the earth black.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Wall
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.Collection: Sports
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.Collection: Strong
There’s not really such thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people, there’s just like…humanity. And it gets broken sometimes.Collection: People
It's rare that I read more than two or three books by any one author, usually only one.Collection: Book
I feel an unfamiliar but pleasant sensation in my lips, tugging them upward. This is... new.Collection: Tugging
If there are rules, we're the ones making them. We can change them whenever we want to.Collection: Want
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.Collection: Feel Better
Are we all just Dark Age doctors, swearing by our leeches? We crave a greater science. We want to be proven wrong.Collection: Dark
Writing isn't letters on paper. It's communication. It's memory.Collection: Memories
...and we'll see what happens when we say Yes while this rigor mortis world screams No.Collection: Rigor Mortis
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.Collection: Stars
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.Collection: Song
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.Collection: Winter
I want life and in all its stupid sticky rawness.Collection: Stupid
Soft flesh is eaten by hard teeth.Collection: Zombie
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.Collection: Eye
Not so easy, Mr Lennon. Even if you try.Collection: Trying
I'm not a general or a colonel or a builder of cities. I'm just a corpse who wants not to be.Collection: Cities
What wonderful thing didn't start out scary?Collection: Scary
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.Collection: Memories
I don't know... there's something kind of beautiful about it, don't you think? That we keep living and growing even though our world is a corpse? That we keep coming back no matter how many of us die?Collection: Beautiful
And yet ... But what if ... I want to do something impossible. Something astounding and unheard of. I want to scrub the moss off the Space Shuttle and fly Julie to the moon and colonise it, or float a capsized cruise ship to some distant island where no one will protest us, or just harness the magic that brings me into the brains of the Living and use it to bring Julie into mine, because it's warm in here, it's quiet and lovely, and in here we aren't an absurd juxtaposition, we are perfect.Collection: Moon
You know things are moving. You're changing, you fellow Dead are changing, the world is ready for something miraculous. What are we waiting for?Collection: Moving
Warm Bodies ended up becoming one of the most personal relatable things I've written.Collection: Becoming One
I wish people were willing to dig a little deeper than the surface elements of a premise before tossing one story in with another.Collection: People
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.Collection: Book
What happened? How did I get here? How could I have known that my choices mattered?Collection: Choices
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.Collection: War
Nothing is permanent. Not even the end of the world.Collection: World
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.Collection: Eerie
We have to remember everything. If we don't, by the time we grow up it'll be gone forever.Collection: Growing Up
We will cry and bleed and lust and love, and we will cure death. We will be the cure. Because we want it.Collection: Lust
Peel off these dusty wool blankets of apathy and antipathy and cynical desiccation. I want life in all its stupid sticky rawness.Collection: Stupid
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.Collection: Feelings
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—Collection: Home
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.Collection: Light
The shadows of the room pool in the lines of our faces, draining our eyes of hue. "There's nothing left worth saying.Collection: Eye
You might say that death has relaxed me.Collection: Might