Isaac Marion Quotes

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.

Isaac Marion

... 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.

Isaac Marion

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.

Isaac Marion

...wanting change is step one, but step two is taking it.

Isaac Marion

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

Isaac Marion

I would like my life to be a movie so I could cut to a montage.

Isaac Marion

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

Isaac Marion

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

Isaac Marion

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.

Isaac Marion

Is this muteness a real physical handicap? One of the many symptoms of being Dead?Or do we just have nothing left to say?

Isaac Marion

I'd like to sit down with him and pick his brain, just a tiny bite somewhere in the frontal lobe to get a taste of his thoughts" -Warm Bodies

Isaac Marion

The burning red taste of blood floods my mouth. The sparkle of life sprays out of his cells like citrus mist from an orange peel, and I suck it in.

Isaac Marion

I think I remember what love was like before. There were complex emotional and biological factors. We had elaborate tests to pass, connections to forge, ups and downs and tears and whirlwinds. It was an ordeal, an exercise in agony, but it was alive. The new love is simpler. Easier. But small.

Isaac Marion

Soft flesh is eaten by hard teeth.

Isaac Marion

I'm watching her talk. Watching her jaw move and collecting her words one by one as they spill from her lips. I don't deserve them. Her warm memories. I'd like to paint them over the bare plaster walls of my soul, but everything I paint seems to peel.

Isaac Marion

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

Isaac Marion

I erupt from the dark, crushing tunnel into a flash of light and noise. A new kind of air surrounds me, dry and cold, as they wipe the last smears of home off my skin. I feel a sharp pain as they snip something, and suddenly I am less. I am no one but myself, tiny and feeble and utterly alone. I am lifted and swungthrough great heights across yawning distances, and given to Her. She wraps around me, so much bigger and softer than I ever imagined from inside,and I strain my eyes open. I see Her. She is immense, cosmic. She is the world. The world smiles down on me, and when She speaks it’s the voice of God, vast and resonant with meaning, but words unknowable, ringing gibberish in my blank white mind.

Isaac Marion

I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses.

Isaac Marion

Maybe eventually winter will finish our job for us and end the world in ice instead of blood.

Isaac Marion

She remembers sprinting over the thin after-waves that slid over each other like sheets of glass. When she ran with the waves it looked like she wasn’t moving. When she ran against them it looked like she was flying. She refuses to believe her brother will never know these things. Somewhere, they will find sand.

Isaac Marion

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.

Isaac Marion

I have begun to wonder where I came from. The person I am now, this fumbling, stumbling supplicant... was I built on the foundations of my old life, or did I rise from the grave a blank state? How much of me is inherited, and how much is my own creation? Questions that were once just idle musings have begun to feel strangely urgent. Am I firmly rooted to what came before? Or can I choose to deviate?

Isaac Marion

The Dead are a larger army than any ever assembled, and they follow no leader, fear no threat, and accept no bribe or compromise. The Dead are the silent majority, and should they ever decide to say something, it will be the new law of the land.

Isaac Marion

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

Isaac Marion

Nora knows better than most that nothing lasts forever. Life doesn't, love doesn't, hope doesn't, so why would death, hate, or despair? Nothing is permanent. Not even the end of the world.

Isaac Marion

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 that when you pull it out on its flimsy fishing wire it hasn't been gnawed to bones by nameless beast below. Hoping you pull up anything at all. Maybe this is why I only sleep 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.

Isaac Marion

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.

Isaac Marion

Suddenly exhausted, she closes her eyes and slips into nightmares again. Graveyards rising out of the ocean. Her friends’ corpses in the light of their burning school. Skeletons ripping open men's chests and crawling inside. She endures it patiently, waiting for the horror film to end and the theater to go dark, those precious few hours of blackout that are her only respite.

Isaac Marion

Deep under our feet the Earth holds its molten breath, while the bones of countless generations watch us and wait.

Isaac Marion

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

Isaac Marion

Enough white lies can scorch the earth black.

Isaac Marion

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.

Isaac Marion

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.

Isaac Marion

Some part of me remembers what snow is, but this is the first time my new mind has seen it. It softens the crumbled sidewalks and turns rusty rooftops white. It’s beautiful. It crunches under my feet as I move toward the house, longing to understand.

Isaac Marion

The ethics of eating people are blurry at best in the fog of my undead amnesia, but I expect more for such a high price. What I want are the moments I will never have. The warm ones. The living ones.

Isaac Marion

My mind has cleared a little; I’ve regained some instincts and associations, echoes of the Living world if not actual memories. Those I still have to steal.

Isaac Marion

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.

Isaac Marion

Sex, once a law as undisputed as gravity, has been disproved. The equation is erased, the blackboard broken

Isaac Marion

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

Isaac Marion

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.

Isaac Marion

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

Isaac Marion

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.

Isaac Marion

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.

Isaac Marion

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.

Isaac Marion

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

Isaac Marion

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

Isaac Marion

Even as I think them, the words lose their context, dissolve into grains of absurdity in the vast ocean of day-to-day hunger.

Isaac Marion

I wish I could read what she's written there. Instead, I pretend the letters are stars. The words, constellations.

Isaac Marion

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.

Isaac Marion

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.

Isaac Marion

I mean obviously, staying alive is pretty fucking important . . . but there’s got to be something beyond that, right?

Isaac Marion

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.

Isaac Marion

To be or not to be, that is the question: to go on living, fighting against this sea of troubles, or to die and end everything? Why be afraid of death? To die is to sleep, no more. Perhaps to dream? Yes, that's the problem: in that sleep of death, what dreams will come?

Isaac Marion

What is left of us? … No countries, no cultures, no wars but still no peace. What’s at our core, then? What’s still squirming in our bones when everything else is stripped?

Isaac Marion

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.

Isaac Marion

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.

Isaac Marion

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?

Isaac Marion

This plague... This curse... I have an idea where it came from. I don't think it's from any spell or virus or nuclear rays. I think it's from a deeper place. I think we brought it here. 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... dark place. We released it. We poked through the seabed and the oil erupted, painted us black, pulled our inner sickness out for everyone to see. Now here we are in this dry corpse of a world, rotting on our feet till there's nothing left but bones and the buzz of flies.

Isaac Marion

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