Max Brooks · 342 pages
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“Lies are neither bad nor good. Like a fire they can either keep you warm or burn you to death, depending on how they're used.”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“Most people don't believe something can happen until it already has. That's not stupidity or weakness, that's just human nature.”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“The only rule that ever made sense to me I learned from a history, not an economics, professor at Wharton. "Fear," he used to say, "fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe." That blew me away. "Turn on the TV," he'd say. "What are you seeing? People selling their products? No. People selling the fear of you having to live without their products." Fuckin' A, was he right. Fear of aging, fear of loneliness, fear of poverty, fear of failure. Fear is the most basic emotion we have. Fear is primal. Fear sells.”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“I think that most people would rather face the light of a real enemy than the darkness of their imagined fears.”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“The monsters that rose from the dead, they are nothing compared to the ones we carry in our hearts”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“There's a word for that kind of lie. Hope.”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“I don't know if great times make great men, but I know they can kill them.”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“Imagine what could be accomplished if only the human race would shed its humanity.”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“Sometimes you find your path, sometimes it finds you.”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“[...]you don’t have to be Sun freakin Tzu to know that real fighting isn’t about killing or even hurting the other guy, it’s about scaring him enough to call it a day.”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“When I believe in my ability to do something, there is no such word as no.”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“You can't blame anyone else, ... , no one but yourself. You have to make your own choices and live every agonizing day with the consequences of those choices.”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“Whatever bro, tell it to the whales”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“They didn't break me. I broke myself.”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“To know is always better, no matter what the answer might be.”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“This is the only time for high ideals because those ideals are all that we have. We aren't just fighting for our physical survival, but for the survival of our civilization. We don't have the luxury of old-world pillars. We don't have a common heritage, we don't have a millennia of history. All we have are the dreams and promises that bind us together. All we have...is what we want to be.”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“They say great times make great men. I don't buy it. I saw a lot of weakness, a lot of filth. People who should have risen to the challenge and either couldn't or wouldn't. Greed, fear, stupidity and hate. I saw it before the war, I see it today. [...] I don't know if great times make great men, but I know they can kill them.”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“If your Soviet neighbor is trying to set fire to your house, you can't be worrying about the Arab down the block. If suddenly it's the Arab in your backyard , you can't be worrying about the People's Republic of China and if one day the ChiComs show up at your front door with an eviction notice in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other, then the last thing you're going do is look over his shoulder for a walking corpse.”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“Americans worship technology. It's an inherent trait in the national zeitgeist.”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“We relinquished our freedom that day, and we were more than happy to see it go. From that moment on we lived in true freedom, the freedom to point to someone else and say “They told me to do it! It’s their fault, not mine.” The freedom, God help us, to say “I was only following orders.”-World War Z”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“Fear is the most basic emotion we have. Fear is primal. Fear sells.”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“There comes a point when you have to realize that the sum of all your blood, sweat, and tears will ultimately amount to zero.”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“Looking back, I still can't believe how unprofessional the news media was. So much spin, so few hard facts. All those digestible sound bites from an army of 'experts' all contradicting one another, all trying to seem more 'shocking' and 'in-depth' than the last one. It was all so confusing, nobody seemed to know what to do.”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“. . . show the other side, the one that gets people out of bed the next morning, makes them scratch and scrape and fight for their lives because someone is telling them that they're going to be okay.”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“There comes a point where emotions must give way to objective facts.”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“America is especially sensitive to war weariness, and nothing brings backlash like the perception of defeat. I say “perception” because America is a very all-or-nothing society… We like to know, and for everyone else to know, that our victory wasn’t uncontested, it was positively devastating.”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“Can you ever "solve" poverty? Can you ever "solve" crime? Can you ever "solve" disease, unemployment, war, or any other societal herpes? Hell no.”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“Can you ever "solve" disease, unemployment, war, or any other societal herpes? Hell no. All you can hope for is to make them manageable enough to allow people to get on with their lives. That's not cynicism, that's maturity.”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
“The official report was a collection of cold, hard data, an objective "after-action report" that would allow future generations to study the events of that apocalyptic decade without being influenced by the "human factor." But isn't the human factor what connects us so deeply to our past? Will future generations care as much for chronologies and casualty statistics as they would for the personal accounts of individuals not so different from themeslves? By excluding the human factor, aren't we risking the kind of personal detachment from a history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it?”
― Max Brooks, quote from World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
Max Brooks
Born place: in New York City, The United States
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“The quickest way to a man`s heart,' said the instructor, 'is proverbially through his stomach. But if you want to get into his brain, I recommend the eye-socket.”
― K.J. Parker, quote from Devices and Desires
“The sensation I was feeling on the clifftop was some sort of reverberation in the air itself.… The whale had submerged and I was still feeling something. The strange rhythm seemed now to be coming from behind me, from the land, so I turned to look across the gorge … where my heart stopped.… Standing there in the shade of the tree was an elephant … staring out to sea!… A female with a left tusk broken off near the base.… I knew who she was, who she had to be. I recognized her from a color photograph put out by the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry under the title “The Last Remaining Knysna Elephant.” This was the Matriarch herself.… She was here because she no longer had anyone to talk to in the forest. She was standing here on the edge of the ocean because it was the next, nearest, and most powerful source of infrasound. The underrumble of the surf would have been well within her range, a soothing balm for an animal used to being surrounded by low and comforting frequencies, by the lifesounds of a herd, and now this was the next-best thing. My heart went out to her. The whole idea of this grandmother of many being alone for the first time in her life was tragic, conjuring up the vision of countless other old and lonely souls. But just as I was about to be consumed by helpless sorrow, something even more extraordinary took place.… The throbbing was back in the air. I could feel it, and I began to understand why. The blue whale was on the surface again, pointed inshore, resting, her blowhole clearly visible. The Matriarch was here for the whale! The largest animal in the ocean and the largest living land animal were no more than a hundred yards apart, and I was convinced that they were communicating! In infrasound, in concert, sharing big brains and long lives, understanding the pain of high investment in a few precious offspring, aware of the importance and the pleasure of complex sociality, these rare and lovely great ladies were commiserating over the back fence of this rocky Cape shore, woman to woman, matriarch to matriarch, almost the last of their kind. I turned, blinking away the tears, and left them to it. This was no place for a mere man.… Early afternoon. They were coming to this place, to this tall grass, all along. They will feed here for a while and then, because there’s no water right here, go down to where those egrets are. There’s water there. After they’ve had a good drink, they might make a big loop and come back here again later to feed some more. It will be a one-family-at-a-time choice as the adults decide when to drink and bathe. When elephants are finally ready to make a significant move, everyone points in the same direction. But they do wait until the matriarch decides. “I’ve seen families cued up waiting for half an hour,” comments Vicki, “waiting for the matriarch to signal, ‘Okay.’” And now they go. Makelele, eleven years old, walks with a deep limp. Five years ago he showed up with a broken right rear leg. It must have been agony, and it’s healed at a horrible angle, almost as if his knee faces backward, shaping that leg like the hock on a horse. Yet he is here, surviving with a little help from his friends. “He’s slow,” Vicki acknowledges. “It’s remarkable that he’s managing, but his family seems to wait for him.” Another Amboseli elephant, named Tito, broke a leg when he was a year old, probably from falling into a garbage pit.”
― Carl Safina, quote from Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel
“Fleurs du mal,” Eve heard herself saying, and shivered. “What?” “Baudelaire. We are not flowers to be plucked and shielded, Captain. We are flowers who flourish in evil.”
― Kate Quinn, quote from The Alice Network
“I snorted. ‘For a great sultan who is lord and ruler of all that he surveys, his English is lamentably poor. He can’t even spell England properly.’
Still holding the note, Mr Ascham looked up at me. ‘Is that so? Tell me, Bess, do you speak his language? Any Arabic or Turkish-Arabic?’
‘You know that I do not.’
‘Then however lamentable his English may be, he still speaks your language while you cannot speak his. To me, this gives him a considerable advantage over you. Always pause before you criticise, and never unduly criticise one who has made an effort at something you yourself have not even attempted.”
― Matthew Reilly, quote from The Tournament
“Coming home is hard." Ven said.
"It shouldn't be" Daleina said. "They love me. I love them. It should be easy."
"Once you leave, it's never easy again. Or at least it's never the same. You're not the same. You can't expect them to be.
She nodded. "Sometimes they feel like strangers. And still, I'd die to protect them.”
― Sarah Beth Durst, quote from The Queen of Blood
A Raisin in the Sun
The Traveler
The Secret Agent
Heretics of Dune
The Last Straw
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