Isaac Marion quotes:

My favorite songs change every year.

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

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.

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.

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

I want a new past,new memories, a new first handshake with love. I want to start over in every possible way.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

As residual life energy fades from the brain, the useless clutter is first to go. The movie quotes, the radio jingles, the celebrity gossip and political slogans, they all melt away, leaving only the most potent and wrenching of the memories. As the brain dies, the life inside clarifies and distills. It ages like a fine wine.

Soft flesh is eaten by hard teeth.

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

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

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.

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

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

I want life and in all its stupid sticky rawness.

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.

Good people see past their own fucking lives."

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.

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.

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

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

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

The past is made out of facts... I guess the future is just hope.

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?

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.

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

I notice faint scars on her wrists and forearms, thin lines too symmetrical to be accidents.

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

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

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

Enough white lies can scorch the earth black.

Nature is hungry. It is ready to take back what the man stole from it by living.

We smile, because this is how we save the world.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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, everything collapses.

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?

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... ?"

But it does make me sad that we've forgotten our names. Out of everything, this seems to me the most tragic. I miss my own and I mourn for everyone else's, because I'd like to love them, but I don't know who they are.

I wish people were willing to dig a little deeper than the surface elements of a premise before tossing one story in with another.

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

I wonder how well she sleeps at night, and what kind of dreams she has. I wish I could step into them like she steps into mine.

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

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

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?

It's a strange feeling, being so utterly surrounded by her. Her life scent is on everything. She's on me and under me and next to me. It's as if the entire room is made out of her.

She is everything. And if she is everything, maybe that's answer enough.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

There's not really such thing as "?good' or "?bad' people, there's just like"¦humanity. And it gets broken sometimes.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Breathing is optional, but I need some air.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

What a massive responsibility, being a moral creature

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 wonderful thing didn't start out scary?

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

I adapt to things quickly, including good things, which I wish I could shut off sometimes.

Even in my bravest moment, I am a coward.

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.

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.

The moment the light went out, everyone stopped pretending.

... 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.

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

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

No praise, no blame. Just so.