Quotes from The Postmortal

Drew Magary ·  369 pages

Rating: (8.5K votes)


“You become a parent, and your whole life becomes about worrying. You just worry constantly whether they'll be okay. And the idea that I'll be worried forever about them and what they do...I almost have a panic attack when I think about it. I'm worried, and I'm worried about having to worry so goddamn much.”
― Drew Magary, quote from The Postmortal


“You're better off believing in God they'd warn you, just in case. Because you'd hate to arrive at the gates of heaven a nonbeliever and find out the Christians had been right all along. It was a pretty ingenious line of thinking. It almost made me want to go to church. Not enough to actually go, but still.”
― Drew Magary, quote from The Postmortal


“This is the Supernova," he said. "Any time he gets worked up, his body bursts into white-hot light that disintegrates anything around him. That's how I felt when I was growing up. Everything I had inside of me, I just wanted to turn loose. Felt like my heart had a nuclear reactor melting down inside of it. That's how you feel when you're young and you want everything.”
― Drew Magary, quote from The Postmortal


“We now live in a world where I think many people walk around asking themselves , do other people matter? Does the rest of the world mean anything to me? Or is all that matters this very small world of friends and family and colleagues that I've constructed for myself?”
― Drew Magary, quote from The Postmortal


“I asked XMN if perhaps this is not the best way to spend one's time. I asked if it might be a symptom of a much deeper personal problem that he has failed to address. He thinks for a moment. "Yeah I'm sure that's part of it. Then again, I don't know if the problems I have can ever be fixed. I don't know how you go about being reborn into a family that loves you. I think I'm damaged permanently. And if that's the case, everyone else deserves the same fate.”
― Drew Magary, quote from The Postmortal



“We talked, and I ate, and for the first time, Katy’s death moved to the back of my consciousness, if only for a moment. This is bereavement: the slow, eventual reassertion of your own meaningless preoccupations. As”
― Drew Magary, quote from The Postmortal


“But everything's always been fucked up. Since the dawn of time. That's why people find each other. For comfort. For shelter. They find their own little crevice in the world, shielded from all the horror.”
― Drew Magary, quote from The Postmortal


“Being stuck awake in the middle of the night feels like prison. There’s nothing to do with yourself, especially when someone else is in the room. I”
― Drew Magary, quote from The Postmortal


“My run up the avenue was complicated by the fact that everyone was staring at their damn phones and tablets, and not at the road ahead of them.”
― Drew Magary, quote from The Postmortal


“Sometimes I think the fact that she died is the reason I'll never stop loving her. She wasn't around long enough for me to grow tired of her personality or her appearance. Every relationship seems to lead to that end. She said it herself. She left me just as my mind had perfected her. The prime condition of love...Sometimes I wonder if that's a good thing. I despise myself for thinking that.”
― Drew Magary, quote from The Postmortal



“I saw her dying on the screen, and I had to fight the urge to turn it off, because it was just so easy to do that and not deal with it--to let her be some distant problem I didn't have to acknowledge.”
― Drew Magary, quote from The Postmortal


About the author

Drew Magary
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Popular quotes

“The poison that is war does not free us from the ethics of responsibility. There are times when we must take this poison - just as a person with cancer accepts chemotherapy to live. We can not succumb to despair. Force is and I suspect always will be part of the human condition. There are times when the force wielded by one immoral faction must be countered by a faction that, while never moral, is perhaps less immoral.
We in the industrialized world bear responsibility for the world’s genocides because we had the power to intervene and did not. We stood by and watched the slaughter in Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Rwanda where a million people died. The blood for the victims of Srebrenica- a designated UN safe area in Bosnia- is on our hands. The generation before mine watched, with much the same passivity, the genocides of Germany, Poland, Hungary, Greece, and the Ukraine. These slaughters were, as in, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book Chronical of a Death Foretold, often announced in advance”
― Chris Hedges, quote from War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning


“As Einstein once wrote (more ringingly in German than in this English translation by one of us [DG]) to honor Isaac Newton: Look unto the stars to teach us How the master’s thoughts can reach us Each one follows Newton’s math Silently along its path.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, quote from Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution


“If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good help to you nevertheless
And filter and fiber your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop some where waiting for you”
― Walt Whitman, quote from Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition


“The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said was, "Why is a raven like a writing-desk?"
"Come, we shall have some fun now!", thought Alice. "I'm glad they've begun asking riddles - I believe I can guess that," she added aloud.
"Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?" said the March Hare.
"Exactly so," said Alice.
"Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on.
"I do," Alice hastily replied; "At least - at least I mean what I say - that's the same thing, you know."
"Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "Why, you might just as well said that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!".
"You might just as well say," added the March Hare, "that "I like what I get" is the same thing as "I get what I like"!".
"You might just as well say," added the Dormouse, which seemed to be talking in its sleep, "that "I breath when I sleep" is the same thing as "I sleep when I breath"!".
"It is the same thing with you," said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn't much.”
― Lewis Carroll, quote from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Other Stories


“Soms wou ik, dat alles voorbij was. Dit zijn vreemde dagen. Je beleeft de geschiedenis uit de eerste hand, de dingen die later in de geschiedenisboekjes zullen staan. Maar van dichtbij lossen ze zich op in zorg en angst.”
― quote from A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary


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