“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.”

“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.”

“Indy Rivers got things done. Maybe she was a fictional character, but they were in a fictional place, in a fictional situation. There were worse things to be than fictional.”

“What kind of world were we living in, where the people we trusted to keep us healthy were the ones keeping us sick[...]”

“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.”

“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.”

“…and Dave and I, we were doing this…this weird circling thing, like we needed to figure out every single line of the script before we could even start the movie. I knew, and he knew, and we didn’t do a damn thing about it…It’s like we thought everything had to be perfect, or it wouldn’t work. Like it was a story.”