“The difference between the truth and a lie is that both of them can hurt, but only one will take the time to heal you afterward.”
“My mother once told me that no woman is naked when she comes equipped with a bad mood and a steady glare.”
“Our story opens where countless stories have ended in the last twenty-six years: with an idiot -- in this case, my brother, Shaun -- deciding it would be a good idea to go out and poke a zombie with a stick to see what happens.”
“Alive or dead, the truth won't rest. Rise up while you can.”
“Every life has a watershed moment, an instant when you realize you're about to make a choice that will define everything else you ever do, and that if you choose wrong, there may not be that many things left to choose. Sometimes the wrong choice is the only one that lets you face the end with dignity, grace, and the awareness that you're doing the right thing.
I'm not sure we can recognize those moments until they've passed us.”
“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.”
“Me, I say those are all great things to live for, if they're what happens to float your boat, but at the end of the day, there's got to be somebody you're doing it for. Just one person you're thinking of everytime you make a decision, everytime you tell the truth, or tell a lie, or anything.
I've got mine. Do you?”
“Are you ever not a pessimist?"
"Sometimes. But then I wake up.”
“My father has always had just one piece of advice about zombies and ammunition, one he’s drilled into my head enough times that it’s managed to stick: When you have one bullet left and there’s no visible way out of the shit you’re standing in, save it for yourself. It’s better than the alternative.”
“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.”
“I am, in fact, immortal when annoyed.”
“That,' he said, with almost religious fever, 'was the coolest thing you have ever done. In fact, that may have been the coolest thing you ever will do. Your entire existence has been moving toward one shining moment, George, and that was the moment when you thought, 'Hey, why don't I just go over the zombies?”
“If we didn't fear the truths we didn't hear, we'd lose the need to fear the ones we did.”
“Failure to die is always appreciated.”
“It is what it is. Isn't that how these things always go? They are what they are. We just get to cope.”
“He'll die first, we both know it, but I don't know... I really don't know how long I'll stay alive without him. That's the part Shaun doesn't know. I don't intend to be an only child for long.”
“Rick stared at him. "Your brother is an alien."
"Yeah, but he's a cute one.”
“Danger is a side effect of what I do, not the reason behind it.”
“Shaun get your sister her glasses. She looks naked without them. It's creeping me out.”
“...although I had to admit a certain affection for the Mattel booth advertising Urban Survival Barbie, now with her own Machete and blood testing unit.”
“I'm a decent sprinter and I can gun a motorcycle from zero to suicidal in less than ten seconds.”
“His idea of traffic safety is going too fast for the cops to catch up.”
“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.”
“We are a nation equally afraid of gathering together and being alone.”
“Post-traumatic shock,' said Shaun. 'He thinks he's a boa constrictor.”
“He didn't have much strength to offer, but what he did have was hers without question.”
“Sometimes I think you take photographs instead of seeing, you forget to look in your eagerness to grasp what is seen, to capture it in time's flight. You are absent from your own pictures, not only because you took them yourself, but also because you betray the moments you want to save from oblivion.”
“we are all little forgotten pieces of shit
only we walk and talk
laugh
make jokes
and
the shit shits
- the shit shits”
“But Mel's and Sarah Jane's joyful tears and my miserable tears had nothing in common.
Just like us.”
“The glass door swung open and two big, homely women walked in looking guilty. They were the kind of women who, out of sheer loneliness, end up doing kinky stuff with candy bars and wake up with apple fritters in their hair.”
“I can defeat you physically with or without a reason. But I can only defeat your mind with a reason. —JIM LAU”
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