Zombies have long captured our imaginations, shambling their way from folklore into the mainstream through movies, books, and even TV shows. These creatures of the undead offer more than just spine-chilling entertainment; they provoke thoughts on survival, humanity, and existential dread. Whether you're a horror enthusiast or just curious about the cultural fascination with the undead, zombie quotes and sayings can offer a surprising blend of humor, wisdom, and insight. In this collection, we've gathered 73 of the most engaging zombie-themed quotes to spark your curiosity and perhaps even unearth some unexpected truths about the world around us.
1. “Often, a school is your best bet-perhaps not for education but certainly for protection from an undead attack.” - Max Brooks
2. “I will not negotiate with the undead!” - David Wellington
3. “Americans worship technology. It's an inherent trait in the national zeitgeist.” - Max Brooks
4. “Michael understood. "Not really. My gear is mostly blindfolds, feathers, and shit I got from the pet store. All the good stuff is expensive." There were online catalogs full of it. Leather and metal. Gags and hoods and cuffs and rope. That's what you really needed when the zombies came.” - Amelia Beamer
5. “They were all looking at him with an unpronounceable hunger. Actually it was a lot like the faces you see in porn, but with less certainty of the course of action. It was as if they couldn't decide whether to fuck him first, and then eat him, or the other way around. Except that probably wouldn't work as well.” - Amelia Beamer
6. “Whip," Walter echoed. "So there's an iPhone app for fighting zombies. Interesting.” - Amelia Beamer
7. “OMG YOU GUYS it has come to my attention that SOMEONE on the internet is saying that my fictional 19th century zombies are NOT SCIENTIFICALLY SOUND. Naturally, I am crushed. To think, IF ONLY I’d consulted with a zombologist or two before sitting down to write, I could’ve avoided ALL THIS EMBARRASSMENT.” - Cherie Priest
8. “I came to the conclusion a while ago that there is nothing romantic or supernatural about loving someone: Love is the privilege of being responsible for another. It was, for a time, what kept me going: Each morning, for a little while, I got to feel the weight of the yoke on my back as I pulled the ancient cart of my species.” - John Green
9. “Fine, but if and when the zombies team up with the mummies to take over the world, you can't live in my underground bunker.” - Emily Cale
10. “What an excellent father you have, girls!' said she, when the door was shut. 'Such joys are scarce since the good Lord saw fit to close the gates of Hell and doom the dead to walk amongst us.” - Seth Grahame-Smith
11. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.” - Seth Grahame-Smith
12. “Don't stop there. I suppose there are also, what, vampires and werewolves and zombies?""Of course there are. Although you mostly find zombies farther south, where the voudun priests are.""What about mummies? Do they only hang around Egypt?""Don't be ridiculous. No one believes in mummies.” - Cassandra Clare
13. “All right, you deadly little ghostlings,” I muttered. “Mama says go back to bed! - Cat” - Jeaniene Frost
14. “Beth from accountingis just sitting in her careating spaghetti.” - Ryan Mecum
15. “All of Europe, as far as we knew, was gone. It might as well not be there anymore. Russia was gone. By the time you got to wondering where America went there just wasn't any more room for it in your brain. A world without America just couldn't happen - the global economy would collapse. Every two penny warlord and dictator in the Third World would have a field day. It just wasn't possible. It would mean global chaos. It would mean the of history as we knew it. Which was exactly what happened.” - David Wellington
16. “Hey!" Caleb snapped as he realized Nick was about to lock him on the outside with their attackers. He pushed the door open and glared at him. "No man left behind."Nick scoffed. "This aint' the army, boy. It's every man for himself. Fall behind. Get eaten” - Sherrilyn Kenyon
17. “Blood is really warm,it's like drinking hot chocolatebut with more screaming.” - Ryan Mecum
18. “She sticks to the rules, because it's all she's got. It's like her feelings dried up and they were replaced with a pile of useless laws. Like my appendix. Don't know what I need it for, but it's still there.” - Monica Valentinelli
19. “The monkey didn't help matters any. He was sitting on top of the microbus, just watching the undead plunge to their end. His face appeared so serene, so intelligent, as if he truly understood the situation. I almost wanted him to turn to me and say, 'This is the turning point of the war! We've finally stopped them! We're finally safe!' But instead his little penis popped out and he peed in my face.” - Max Brooks
20. “Then he said in his most excellent Mick impression, "Your powers are useless against Ninja Lords, O great zombie hunter! Surrender or feel the sting of the shuriken!” - alan goldsher
21. “Jane woke, stretched, and decided to kill herself. If she hadn’t found a reason to live by the end of the day she would jump from the rig. It felt good to have a plan.” - Adam Baker
22. “Where did you find that one?""I have no idea. I'm a magnet for crazies, I guess.""They must be able to sense a kindred spirit.""Your one to talk. Don't you have more hordes of the undead to lead in a glorious revolution?""Zombies not undead. There's a fine distinction. And no. Right now I'm scouting new talent. The glorious revolution comes tomorrow.” - Kiersten White
23. “Nothing is impossible to kill. It's just that sometimes after you kill something you have to keep shooting it until it stops moving” - Mira Grant
24. “I suppose I knew on an intellectual level that graves weren't especially made for getting out of. I mean, you start with a hermetically sealed casket and then you dump six feet of dirt on top of it. Over time the earth gets compacted, which can't make it easy to dig through. So even if you're a very angry and determined zombie, you've kind of got your work cut out for you just escaping from the grave.Which was, I suppose, why we got hit with an initial wave of zombie bugs, birds and rodents. I bet some people would say if you've never picked undead mosquitoes out of your teeth, you've never lived. Under that definition, I'd be just as happy to have not lived, thanks.” - C.E. Murphy
25. “It's why I get miffed at all the dashing around in recent zombie films. It completely misses the point; transforms the threat to a straightforward physical danger from the zombies themselves, rather than our own inability to avoid them and these films are about us, not them. There's far more meat on the bones of the latter, far more juicy interpretation to get our teeth into. The first zombie is by comparison thin and one dimensional and ironically, it is down to all the exercise.” - Simon Pegg
26. “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
27. “Then the Skopamish showed up. Their chests heaving, rotting eyes like dull raisins in their skulls. Their eyes found mine like a witching wand seeking water.” - Tamara Rose Blodgett
28. “Okay, it's pretty obvious what we're doing here, people. If it's dead - fucking KILL IT” - Robert Kirkman
29. “Be nice to her,” I muttered under my breath. “She’s my sister; she got sick. She lost her kid. For all I know, she may have eaten her.” - Joan Frances Turner
30. “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
31. “Are we all just Dark Age doctors, swearing by our leeches? We crave a greater science. We want to be proven wrong.” - Isaac Marion
32. “I totally don't know what to do." He got up and started pacing. "Am I supposed to get you a present? Or maybe a card. I'm completely lost.” - David Lubar
33. “Little old laidesspeed away in their wheel chairs,frightened meals on wheels.” - Ryan Mecum
34. “So why are you so mad at me for kissing you?”“Because you took too long. If you'd done that, say, three years ago, we wouldn't have only had one kiss before we both get horribly mutilated.” - Rusty Fischer
35. “Just try it,” he murmurs, reaching over to cover my hand gently.And I think, Whoa, that’s never happened before!Then: Is he just doing that because he thinks Wyatt is interested?And, finally, this: Who the hell cares?!” - Rusty Fischer
36. “...and we'll see what happens when we say Yes while this rigor mortis world screams No.” - Isaac Marion
37. “Everything's better with zombies - NOT” - Lily Herne
38. “Not all the magic of earth is benevolent.” - Alden Bell
39. “What is it like.... what is it like to be dead?' Evan looked at him with his dull, unblinking blue eyes, ' I don't know, what is it like...... to be alive?” - Daniel Waters
40. “To me, the best zombie movies aren’t the splatter fests of gore and violence with goofy characters and tongue in cheek antics. Good zombie movies show us how messed up we are, they make us question our station in society… and our society’s station in the world. They show us gore and violence and all that cool stuff too… but there’s always an undercurrent of social commentary and thoughtfulness.” - Robert Kirkman
41. “And then everything was in the hands of gravity, which has never had much love for the terminally stupid.” - Mira Grant
42. “But no matter what happens to the surviving humans, there will always be the walking dead.” - Max Brooks
43. “Each time a girl approached the table, Mortimer would smile. Like this: And each time the girl would shriek and run away.” - Kelly DiPucchio
44. “When Jesus said “Whoever eats my flesh & drinks my blood has eternal life” John 6:54 He was CLEARLY talking to Zombies & Vampires” - Pablo
45. “It is meant to be survival of the fittest, not survival of the most floral.” - Stephen Herfst
46. “What makes us the strongest tribe on the continent is the fact that a group that opposes these values--a group that would have mankind remain in the new dark ages--is permitted to grow, permitted to exist...and, after it becomes a violent terrorist organization, is allowed to live on it own lands, taken out of the lands of those it has attacked and continues to attack!" He had to stop speaking then--the applause was louder than even his amplified voice. "They expect that fear will drive us to become like them...closed-minded, blind, angry. Our society will remain open and free so long as I am standing upright," he continued, once the applause died down.” - Lia Habel
47. “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.” - Mira Grant
48. “If a responsible, mentally sound American wants to own and AR-15, that’s their right. Besides, when the zombies come…okay, you don’t like the zombie thing. When the Chinese invade our country, who do you want to depend on? The over-extended police force and the National Guard? Or the next door neighbor who’s a former Marine and has enough guns and ammunition for your entire block?” - Aaron B. Powell
49. “Jett Gallatin expected trouble in Alsop, Texas—but not zombies.” - Mercedes Lackey
50. “His question is pretty dangerous for me to try to answer, so I don’t—it continues to hang out there like the stained underwear at a slumber party that goes unclaimed.” - Jen Naumann
51. “The conversation limped along this line of thought much like a zombie: lifeless and mindless and making a jelly of whatever healthy brains were within its reach.” - Steve Hockensmith
52. “Fuathan don’t come out until after dark. Sunlight kills them.’‘Like vampires?’‘Kind of. Very mean, sub-aquatic vampires who don’t need to drink your blood, but might do it anyway, just for fun.” - Somerset McCoy
53. “He's a ghost, not a carnival magician.-Benny Imura” - Jonathan Maberry
54. “He never did get right all the way again. And every once in a while he'd come down all bitey.” - Jonathan Maberry
55. “There is another system, more beaded than weather or murder, that is moving up into the province. As Les leaves the chair to investigate his son’s crying a thousand zombies form an alliterative fog around Lake Scugog and beyond, mouthing the words Helen, hello, help. This fog predominates the region; however, other systems compete, bursting and winding with vowels braiding into dipthongs so long that they dissipate across a thousand panting lips. In the suburbs of Barrie, for instance, an alliteration that began with the wail of a cat in heat picked up the consonant “Guh” from a fisherman caught in surprise on Lake Simcoe. The echoing coves of the lake added a sort of meter, and by the time these sounds arrived in Gravenhurst, the people there were certain that a musical was blaring from speakers in the woods. All across the province, zombies, like extras in a crowd scene, imitate a thousand conversations. They open and close their mouths on things and sound is a heavy carpet of mumbling, a pre-production monstrosity. In minutes the Pontypool fog will march on the town of Sunderland and over the barriers south of Lindsay.” - Tony Burgess
56. “Hands and lips and teeth, and you'd forgotten-no, you'd never known-this way of knowing someone, this dissolution of self, this autophagy.” - Alaya Dawn Johnson
57. “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
58. “I’d once again see that bob of blonde hair back on my pillow, that pink hot smile beaming toward me as I heroically win her heart in some kind of Count of Monte Cristo or Great Gatsby-esque gesture… you know minus the long imprisonment or swimming pool death!” - Tom Conrad
59. “He grumbles incoherently, opens the window a fraction and continues to smoke away. It’s like every time Sidney Drake enters a new location he has to readjust the atmosphere, akin to one of those sci-fi shows where they oxygenate the planet, but for my dad it’s in a suffocating reverse. He replaces the clean wholesome air with a non-stop puff of toxic poison.” - Tom Conrad
60. “The truth was, neither the Central Intelligence Agency nor any of the other official and unofficial U.S. intelligence organizations have ever been some kind of all-seeing, all-knowing, global illuminati. For starters, we never hand that kind of funding.” - Max Brooks
61. “How do I appear unthreatening when her lover's blood is running down my chin?” - Isaac Marion
62. “[Reggie] had a way of picking the bad ideas, which is why we should’ve just said no.(from GAMELAND Episode 1: Deep into the Game)” - Saul Tanpepper
63. “Who knew death could lead to an eating disorder?” - Corey Redekop
64. “Fresh is best.” - Die Booth
65. “For there has never been a story nearly as tragic as the one of Frankenstein, except for that of Johnny Heart and his Francesca Valentine.” - Rae Hachton
66. “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
67. “Zombies are the liberal nightmare. Here you have the masses, whom you would love to love, appearing at your front door with their faces falling off; and you’re trying to be as humane as you possibly can, but they are, after all, eating the cat. And the fear of mass activity, of mindlessness on a national scale, underlies my fear of zombies.” - Clive Barker
68. “I continued toward Atlanta with a Merle Haggard C.D. playing on the stereo. They weren't great hosts, but those guys in The Ted Kaczynski Fan Club had great taste in music. It was all classic country music- none of that sissy, boy-band country that they played on the radio all the time. I drove down the road while Merle preferred to just stay where he was and drink.” - Ian McClellan
69. “Yeah, okay. You're right. I was having dinner with Zombie Carl the other night. You know, steak, rare, and a bottle of vintage type A. He told me all his secrets, but too bad for you I promised him I wouldn't tell. In exchange I asked him to gather his best undead buddies and stalk me through my friend's yard. And oh, yeah, it was totally fine if they wanted to use me as an all-night-dinner buffet, because having organs is SO last year.” - Gena Showalter
70. “I’m alive; I’m not gonna try eating your ass, okay? Don’t shoot!” “What… Eat my ASS?”“Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.” - Etienne Guerin DeForest
71. “Which got me to wondering whether it’s possible to learn how to be a person in a world where all the people are dead.” - John Green
72. “...So I put it out of its misery, if it really was miserable, and tried not to think about it. That was another thing they taught us at Willow Creek: don't write their eulogy, don't try to imagine who they used to be, how they came to be here, how they came to be this. I know, who doesn't do that, right? Who doesn't look at one of those things and just naturally start to wonder? It's like reading the last page of a book... your imagination just naturally spinning. And that's when you get distracted, get sloppy, let your guard down and end up leaving someone else to wonder what happened to you.” - Max Brooks
73. “Sure, zombies can “be a metaphor.” They can represent the oppressed, as in Land of the Dead, or humanity’s feral nature, as in 28 Days. Or racial politics or fear of contagion or even the consumer unconscious (Night of the Living Dead, Resident Evil, Dawn of the Dead). We could play this game all night.But really, zombies are not “supposed to be metaphors.” They’re supposed to be friggin’ zombies. They follow the Zombie Rules: they rise from death to eat the flesh of the living, they shuffle in slow pursuit (or should, anyway), and most important, they multiply exponentially. They bring civilization down, taking all but the most resourceful, lucky and well-armed among us, whom they save for last. They make us the hunted; all of us.That’s the stuff zombies are supposed to do. Yes, they make excellent symbols, and metaphors, and have kick-ass mythopoeic resonance to boot. But their main job is to follow genre conventions, to play with and expand the Zombie Rules, to make us begin to see the world as a place colored by our own zombie contingency plans. […]Stories are the original virtual reality device; their internal rules spread out into reality around us like a bite-transmitted virus, slowly but inexorably consuming its flesh. They don’t just stand around “being metaphors” whose sole purpose is to represent things in the real world; they eat the real world.” - Scott Westerfeld
