Mira Grant

“George, she says it's the truth that matters. We live and die for the chance to maybe tell a little bit of the truth, maybe shame the Devil just a little bit before we go.”

“A sulking sister is better than a scolding sister.”

“I feel the closest to crazy when I'm disagreeing with the voice in my head”

“Sometimes you need lies to stay alive.”

“When you're going to play with dead things, do it during the daylight.”

“And then everything was in the hands of gravity, which has never had much love for the terminally stupid.”

“This is crap," Shaun said, withdrawing his arm."Right," I agreed. "Absolutely fucking crap.""No argument.""I want to punch somebody right about now.""Not it," Rick said."I punch back," Steve said.”

“Shaun get your sister her glasses. She looks naked without them. It's creeping me out.”

“I honestly have no idea what's going on anymore. I just need to find something I can hit. (Shaun Mason)”

“This is what I do know: A lie, however well-intended, can't prepare you for reality or change the world... To tell the truth is to provide armament against a world too full of cruelties to be defeated with simple falsehoods... It seems to me we owe the world--more, we owe ourselves--the exchange of comfort for the chance that maybe the truth can do what people always say it can. The truth may, given the opportunity, set us free.”

“Sometimes in the news, "luck" is just a matter of "capitalizing on someone else's pain.”

“I suggest it’s time we head off to see the Wizard. The wonderful Wizard of Jesus We Are All So Fucked.”

“I recommend Avon Skin-So-Soft. It’s a bath product. It smells like someone fed a Disney Princess through a juicer, but it works better than anything else on the market.”

“Some lines were never meant to be crossed, however good your cause may seem.”

“Shaun has working his audience into a frenzy down to a science; by the time he's done with them, they get excited by the mysterious discovery of pocket lint. It's impressive, but I'd rather watch him move. There's something wonderful about the way he lets go, becoming all energy and excitement as he outlines what's coming next. Maybe it's geeky for a girl my age to admit she still loves her brother. I don't care. I love him, and one day I'll bury him, and until then, I'm going to be grateful that I'm allowed to watch him talk.”

“Remember how pissed you got when we had to do all that reading about the Rising back in sixth grade? I thought you were going to get us both expelled. You said the only way things could've gotten as bad as they did was if people were willing to take the first easy answer they could find and cling to it, rather than doing anything as complicated as actually thinking.”

“Think about that for a moment. They died for you. Now take a good look at the life you're living and tell me: Did they do the right thing?”

“I’m also fascinated by the difference between terror and fear. Fear says, “Do not actually put your hand in the alligator,” while terror says, “Avoid Florida entirely because alligators exist.”

“He had the same empty confusion in his eyes that I saw in my mirror every morning, that odd sort of denial that only seems to come when the world decides to jump the rails without warning you first.”

“This is the truth: We are a nation accustomed to being afraid. If I’m being honest, not just with you but with myself, it’s not just the nation, and it’s not just something we’ve grown used to. It’s the world, and it’s an addiction. People crave fear. Fear justifies everything. Fear makes it okay to have surrendered freedom after freedom, until our every move is tracked and recorded in a dozen databases the average man will never have access to. Fear creates, defines, and shapes our world, and without it, most of us would have no idea what to do with ourselves. Our ancestors dreamed of a world without boundaries, while we dream new boundaries to put around our homes, our children, and ourselves. We limit our potential day after day in the name of a safety that we refuse to ever achieve. We took a world that was huge with possibility, and we made it as small as we could.”

“Kellis-Amberlee is a fact of existence. You live, you die, and then you come back to life, get up, and shamble around trying to eat your former friends and loved ones. That’s the way it is for everyone.”

“The people who have the power want you scared. They want you walking around paralyzed by the notion that you could die at any moment.”

“Do your research. Do your homework. Learn what this man would do to our country in the name of preserving a brand of freedom that is as destructive as it is impossible to secure. Know your enemy.”

“...The CDC has also said that it’s virtually impossible to tell a murder victim killed by a shot to the head or spinal column from an infected individual put down legally in the same fashion. What is your answer to critics of the relaxed gun control laws who hold that gun-related violence has actually increased, but has been masked by the postmortem amplification of the Kellis-Amberlee virus?”

“There comes a point when you need to get over the fear and get on with your life, and a lot of people don’t seem to be capable of that anymore. From blood tests to gated communities, we have embraced the cult of fear, and now we don’t seem to know how to put it back where it belongs.”

“We are a nation equally afraid of gathering together and being alone.”

“There will always be people for whom hate is easier when it’s not backed up by anything but fear.”

“The rest of the question-and-answer period was pretty standard stuff, with a few hardballs thrown in just to keep things interesting. Where did the senator stand on the death penalty? Given that most corpses tended to get up and try to eat folks, he didn’t see it as a productive pursuit. What was his opinion on public health care? Failure to keep people healthy enough to stay alive bordered on criminal negligence. Was he prepared to face the ongoing challenges of disaster preparedness? After the mass reanimations following the explosions in San Diego, he couldn’t imagine any presidency surviving without improved disaster planning.”

“One thing I did learn from those classes is that the world is not, in any way, what people expected thirty years ago. The zombies are here, and they’re not going away, but they’re not the story. They were, for one hot, horrible summer at the beginning of the century, but now they’re just another piece of the way things work. They did their part: They changed everything.”

“The garage door slid open as we pulled into the driveway, registering the sensors Shaun and I wear around our neck. In case of viral amplification, the garage becomes the zombie equivalent of a roach motel: Our sensors get us in, but only a clean blood test and a successful voice check gets us out. If we ever fail those tests, we’ll be incinerated by the house defense system before we can do any further damage.”

“I heard all three bolts click home. Even if I screamed, they’d never let me back inside. That’s the protocol when you’re in the field. No matter how loudly you yell, they never let you in. Not if they want to live, anyway.”

“When you’re being chased by zombies, hills are either your best friends or your burial ground. The slope slows them down, which is great, unless you hit the peak and find out that you’re surrounded, with nowhere left to run to.”

“We have speed, and we have bullets. Everything else about this fight is in their favor.”

“There was no warning before the outbreaks began. One day, things were normal; the next, people who were supposedly dead were getting up and attacking anything that came into range. This was upsetting for everyone involved, except for the infected, who were past being upset about that sort of thing.”

“That was the cold equation. How many lives is one person, even a totally innocent person, going to be worth?”

“Running around in the grass near an unsecured structure and a bunch of trees is a good way of taking yourself out of the gene pool.”

“Irwins are never more alive than when they’re five minutes away from getting slaughtered.”

“That’s the trouble with being scared all the time. Eventually, people just go numb.”

“People who can’t hack it as Irwins because they’re too violent go into the air travel industry.”

“...If there’s a God, there are plenty of people who know where he is.” I shrugged, still watching the sky. ... “I just want to know that he’s there, so that I can die knowing there’s going to be someone I can punch in the mouth on the other end.”

“I like to think of myself as a reasonable man. But I have buried too many friends in the too-recent past, and I have seen too many lies go unquestioned, and too many questions go unasked. There is a time when even reasonable men must begin to take unreasonable actions. To do anything else is to be less than human.”

“I took his hand and shook it. Even with all the training I’ve had to desensitize me to the necessity of occasional contact with strangers, the gesture felt wrong. You aren’t supposed to touch people you don’t know. Not unless they’ve just demonstrated their infection status with a successful blood test, and maybe not even then.”

“...You may think you’re doing the right thing, and hell, you may even be right, but when you don’t let anyone watch over your shoulder, how the fuck are the rest of us supposed to know?”

“...even saying good-bye isn’t enough. There’s always one more thing you should have had the time to say, or do, or ask. There’s always going to be that one missing piece.”

“Most guys my age have girlfriends and drinking buddies on their speed dial. Me, I have the Memphis CDC.”

“The Masons may not have taught me much about how to treat a guest, but they taught me not to shoot at them unless it was absolutely necessary.”

“More things we learned from the Rising: It’s hard to gentrify a city that’s on fire.”

“Neither of them was wearing a face shield. That put grenades out until I could get them to move out of the blast radius, since aerosolized zombie will kill you just as sure as the clawing, biting kind.”

“William stared at him, coffee forgotten. “Oh, Jesus.” “I’m pretty sure he’s not listening, but you can call him if it makes you feel better,” said Chris.”

“Then you know why I'm not in the mood for sunshine and puppies." I paused. "That expression makes no sense. Why the hell would I ever be in the mood for puppies?""Shaun—""I could go with sunshine, though. Sunshine is useful. It should really be 'sunshine and shotguns.' Something you'd actually be happy about.""Shaun—”