Mira Grant

“The one thing I have absolute faith in is mankind's capacity to make things worse. No matter how bad it gets, we're all happy to screw each other over. It's enough to make me wonder if we should have let the zombies win.”

“You know what? Fuck it. Just fuck it. The Rising didn't manage to wipe out the human race, it just made us turn into even bigger assholes than we were before. Hear that, mad science? You failed. You were supposed to kill us all, and instead you turned us into monsters.”

“My story ended where so many stories have ended since the Rising: with a man—in this case, my adoptive brother and best friend, Shaun—holding a gun to the base of my skull as the virus in my blood betrayed me, transforming me from a thinking human being into something better suited to a horror movie.”

“Why can't you just say 'don't breathe the water' like a normal person?""Because I'm a doctor, and they teach us never to use little words where big ones will do.”

“Some people say I have issues. I say those people need to expand their horizons because I don't have issues, I have the Library of Congress”

“If you still want to do this crap after the first time you’ve burned the body of a six-year-old with blood on her lips and a Barbie in her hands, I’ll welcome you with open arms.”

“And thus, in a single moment, did my life go from unbearably strange, but still tolerable, to actively impossible. I am willing to allow that, once one lives in a world where science can transform mosquitoes into the harbingers of the apocalypse, the rules of our forefathers have, perhaps, ceased to apply.”

“If you want to go foraging into the wilds of Canada without proper gear, you deserve what you get, even if that happens to include being attacked by an undead moose.”

“You bastard.”“My parents were married.”

“You know, addressing my crazy by name doesn’t exactly help me stay sane,” I said. “Nothing can help you stay sane at this point, Mason,” said Becks. “That ship has sailed.”

“The old Internet rallying cry: pics or it didn’t happen.”

“She was sitting on the counter, holding a can of Coke. “Looking for this?” she asked. “My savior.” I walked toward her, making grabbing motions. “Gimme. Gimme sweet, sweet caffeine.” “The word is ‘please,’ Mason.”

“That's what humanity does when faced with wolves. We take them in, tame them, and teach them how to keep us safe.”

“Given a choice between life and death, choose life. Given a choice between right and wrong, choose what's right. And given a choice between a terrible truth and a beautiful lie, choose the truth every time.”

“You're a mad scientist,' said Maggie, in what may well have been intended as a reassuring tone. 'We don't expect you to be nice. We just go to bed every night hoping you won't mutate us before we wake up.'Dr. Abbey blinked at her. 'That's...almost sweet. In a disturbing sort of a way.”

“There's only one thing we never wrote down. You know what it was.”

“...but that was the thing about reality. It didn't need to make sense.”

“My name is Georgia Mason, and I am begging you. Rise up while you can.”

“I've got no problem with octopuses. It's bugs and spiders that I don't like. Octopuses are cute, in their own 'nature did a lot of drugs' sort of way.”

“We were the ones on scene when everything went down. We weren't better. We weren't worse. We were just the ones standing in the blast radius.”

“One man's gospel truth is another man's blasphemous lie. The dangerous thing about people is the way we'll try to kill anyone whose truth doesn't agree with ours.”

“You really can't go home again. Sometimes, that's a good thing. Sometimes, when you try, you find out that home isn't really there anymore... but that it wasn't only in your head before. Home actually existed. Home wasn't just a dream. Sometimes, that's the best thing of all.”

“May posterity show mercy when it look back upon the work we do today. We did what we could with what we had.”

“Hire new field systems maintainer" was near the top of my to-do list, right under "uncover massive political conspiracy," "avenge Buffy's death," and "don't die.”

“I would have dismissed [the email] as spam, except for the first word: urgent. People stopped flinging that word around like confetti after the Rising. Somehow, the potential for missing the message that zombies just ate your mom made offering to give people a bigger dick seem less important.”

“Fuck it. Let's blow some shit up." - Shaun Mason”

“I'll challenge senators and kings for the right to know the truth, but far be it from me to challenge a woman in her own kitchen.”

“It's the oldest story in the world. Boy loves girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl back thanks to the unethical behavior of megalomaniacal mad scientists who never met a corpse they wouldn't try to resurrect. Anyone coming within a hundred yards of my happy ending had better pray that they're immune to bullets. - Shaun Mason”

“If the directions say to do it, we do it," said Maggie. "That's what everyone says. If you don't listen to the Monkey, he doesn't meet with you.""Let's hope the directions don't tell us to shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die," I muttered, and pulled out onto the street.”

“No team is complete without a good technician, and the word for an incomplete team is usually "fatality.”

“A lot of people don't think my brother has a temper. It's like they assume I somehow sucked up the entire quota of "cranky," and now Shaun's perpetually cheery and ready for a challenge while I glower at people from behind my sunglasses and plot the downfall of the Western world.”

“How am I coping? I miss George and the goddamn world is still full of zombies, that's how. Everything else...Everything else is just details. And those don't really matter to me anymore.”

“I guess in the end, it doesn’t matter what we wanted. What matters is what we chose to do with the things we had.”

“If we're going to die horribly, we're all going to do it together.”

“Alive or dead, the truth won't rest. Rise up while you can.”

“Hysteria takes too much energy to be maintained forever.”

“Follow the rules whenever possible. That makes it a lot more surprising when you break them.”

“God is the ultimate recycler. We have a good planet here. It has its troubles, yes. We have overpopulation, we have pollution, we have global warming, we have the Thursday night television lineup,” more laughter, “and, of course, we have the infected. We have a lot of problems on Earth, and it might seem like a great idea to hold the Rapture now—why wait? Let’s move on to Heaven, and leave the trials and tribulations of our earthly existence behind us. Let’s get while the getting’s good, and beat the rush. “It might seem like a great idea, but I don’t think it is, for the same reason I don’t think it’s a great idea for a first grader to stand up and say that he’s learned enough, he’s done with school, thanks a lot but he’s got it from here. Compared to God, we’re barely out of kindergarten, and like any good teacher, I don’t believe He intends to let us out of class just because we’re finding the lessons a little difficult. I don’t know whether I believe in the Rapture or not. I believe that if God wants to do it, He will… but I don’t believe that it’s coming in our lifetime. We have too much work left to do right here.”

“Words have power.”

“She told the truth as she saw it, and she died for it. I came along for the ride, and I lived. It wasn't worth it. But it was the truth, and it was what had to happen.”

“It is what it is. Isn't that how these things always go? They are what they are. We just get to cope.”

“A martyr's just a casualty with really good PR.”

“Life's more fun when you take the chance that it might end.”

“At least you know that you're crazy. That means you have the potential to recover.”

“Don't start. My mood stays better if you don't start.”

“Fuck survivor's guilt. I'm not supposed to be the guilty one here. The people who made me the last man standing... they're the guilty ones. And they're the ones who should be afraid.”

“Behold the power of the truth. When people see its shadow on the wall, they don't want to take the time to look away.”

“...they come to us, these restless dead,Shrouds woven from the words of men,With trumpets sounding overhead(The walls of hope have grown so thinAnd all our vaunted innocenceHas withered in this endless frost)That promise little recompenseFor all we risk, for all we've lost...”

“I just find it interesting that kids apparently used to cry when Bambi's mother died. George and I both held our breaths, and then cheered when she didn't reanimate and try to eat her son.”

“The day was getting more interesting by the minute. I just had to hope it was the sort of interesting we'd live to talk about later.”