“Even after death, life still goes on.”

“I was still wearing my shoes. The staff was paid to wash the sheets after every visit, and by the point we left the field, I’d dressed and undressed so many times in the course of decontamination that I never wanted to remove my clothes again. I’d just wear them until they dissolved, and then spend the rest of my life naked.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Any good Irwin can make going to the corner store for a candy bar and a Coke lood death defying and suicidal.”

“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.”