Jonathan Maberry Quotes

We're each alone inside our heads, some more so than others.

Point is, people lie a lot. Sometimes out of habit. Not many people are good at telling the truth.

Basher shook his head. "No, we climbed in through a ground-floor guest bedroom all ninja-like. Snuck up the back stairs." "Then you might be the cavalry," said Tom, "but I'm Santa Claus. Let's go downstairs and open some presents.

She wept for the hurt that he owned, a hurt she could never hope to remove.

There are moments that define a person's whole life. MOMENTS in which everything they are and everything they may possibly become hinge on a single decision.

Revenge is an infection of the spirit.

Guilt and rage, hatred and fear were pathways to weakness and clumsy choices.

But sometimes shame is a more powerful engine than rage. Like rage, it burns hot; and like rage it tends to consume its own furnace.

Suffering is easier to endure when shared.

They won the war but lost the peace.

No matter what choice you make, it doesn't define you. Not forever. People can make bad choices and change their minds and hearts and do good things later; just as people can make good choices and then turn around and walk a bad path. No choice we make lasts our whole life. If there's ever a choice you've made that you no longer agree with, you can make another choice.

A wise man once said that we can't make anyone feel or do anything. We can throw things into the wind, but it's up to each person to decide how they want to react, where they want to stand when things fall.

Closure isn't closure until someone's ready to close the door.

I’m not sure I could trust a man who would bypass an Oreo in favor of vanilla wafers. It’s a fundamental character flaw, possibly a sign of true evil.

Sometimes people say terrible things when they're scared. They don't mean to, but they can't help it. They lash out because if they can see that their words hurt someone else, it makes them feel as if they aren't completely powerless.

Rage was sometimes a useful ally in the heat of a fight, but it was a trickster. It made everything seem possible.

Chong said, 'Do yourself a favor, Morg. Next time you're staring at a girl's boobs, look up. You'll be shocked to learn it, but there's going to be a face up there. Nose, mouth, eyes. And behind the eyes is an actual person.

It's just that I'm fifteen, and I have this crazy idea I might actually have a life in front of me. I don't see how it's going to do me much good to believe that the world is over and this is just an epilogue.

His specialty was interrogation. Imagine it, gentlemen. Being strapped to a table so that you are entirely at the mercy of a monster such as this. A person who delights in your pain. A person to whom your screams are more delicious than a lover's whisper. A creature who knows how to keep you alive while he skillfully and meticulously deconstructs those things that define you as human?

He knew that these creatures were dead, that they were reanimated echoes who wore the disguise of the people they had once been, but Tom's words rang in his mind. They used to be people. How could he strike them? How could he hurt them? Children, women, old people. Lost souls.

Sometimes shame is a more powerful engine than rage.

Everyone carries around his own monsters.---Richard Pryor

This one looks good,” said Chong over breakfast the next morning. Benny read out loud from the paper. “‘Pit Thrower.’ What’s that?” “I don’t know,” Chong said with a mouth full of toast. “I think it has something to do with barbecuing.” It didn’t.

How do you know that?" "Because,"Chong said with raised eyebrows,"when you open those things called 'books',there are words as well as pictures.Sometimes the words tell you stuff.

Yo! Deadheads," he yelled, waving his sword to taunt them. "Nice try, but you're messing with Benny-freaking-Imura, zombie killer. Booyah!

Is he nuts?" "I think the expression used to be 'touched by God'." "So that would be a yes.

I've managed to stay alive out here in the Ruin because I'm a realist. I allow the truth to be the truth, no matter how much I might want it to be something else.

Walls, towns, rules, and day-to-day life doesn't make us civilized ... That's organization and ritual. Civilization lives in our hearts and heads or it doesn't exist at all.

That's stupid." "That's people.

A HUMAN ELEMENT is an elegant and haunting first novel. Unrelenting, devious but full of heart. Highly recommended.

UNMARKED is both gorgeous and hideous. A frightening and disturbing tale spun with great beauty. Absolutely riveting.

You have to keep your mind as wide-open as your eyes, because almost nothing is what it seems.

When Chong made to sit down next to her, Lilah drew her knife and stabbed the point into the earth between them. "I can see that you need some quiet time," he said and scuttled quickly away.

Nix still held Benny's hand, and her grip tightened to an almost crushing force, grinding his hand bones together. It hurt, but Benny would rather have cut that hand off than take it back at that moment. If it would help Nix through this, he'd give her a pair of pliers and a vise so she could do a proper job.

The truth is the truth. What changes is what we know about it and what we're willing to believe.

Often it was the most unlikely people who found within themselves a spark of something greater. It was probably always there, but most people are never tested, and they go through their whole lives without ever knowing that when things are at their worst, they are at their best.

When you have to kill the same terrorist twice in one week, then there's either something wrong with your skills or something wrong with your world. And there's nothing wrong with my skills.

My whole body is a lethal weapon, you know. I know more ways to kill you than you know how to die.

Generosity could be as contagious as the zombie plague as long as enough people were willing to be carriers.

Things said and done innocently should never be used as weapons.

It's important to know the past, but your survival depends on knowing the present.

There are moments that define a person's whole life. Moments in which everything they are and everything they may possibly become balance on a single decision. Life and death, hope and despair, victory and failure teeter precariously on the decision made at that moment. These are moments ungoverned by happenstance, untroubled by luck. These are the moments in which a person earns the right to live, or not.

...but it was death that changed. People are still people. Some good, some bad. Death changed, and we don't know what death really means anymore. Maybe that was the point. Maybe this is an object lesson about the arrogance of our assumptions. Hard to say. But the world? She didn't change. She healed. We stopped hurting her and she began to heal. You can see it all around. The whole world is a forest now. The air is fresher. More trees, more oxygen.

The whole world turned into an all-you-can-eat buffet.

There was a sliver of moon and a splash of stars, and the light outlined her face and glistened on the tears that ran like mercury down her cheeks.

Courage is tricky, oily. Easy to drop, easy to misplace." "I thought that if you had courage you always had it.". . . "Lilah, nothing is always there. Not courage, not joy, not hate or hope or anything else. We find courage, lose it, sometimes misplace it for years, and sometimes live in its grace for a while.

It’s easier to be a character in a story than the star of your own tragedy.

They held each other and wept as the night closed its fist around their tiny shelter, and the world below them seethed with killers both living and dead.