Warm Bodies (Warm Bodies, #1)

by Isaac Marion

But I’m not afraid of the skeletons in Julie’s closet. I look forward to meeting the rest of them, looking them hard in the eye, giving them firm, bone-crunching handshakes.

“I have perspective here. It’s hard to take your life so seriously when you can see it all at once.”

“You and I are victims of the same disease. We’re fighting the same war, just different battles in different theaters, and it’s way too late for me to hate you for anything, because we’re the same damn thing.

We don’t care about assigning blame for the human condition, we just want to cure it.”

I can no longer hide behind my ignorance. I know now that I have a choice, and I choose to change no matter what the cost.

You won’t starve, R. In my short life I made so many choices just because I thought they were required, but my dad was right: there’s no rule book for the world. It’s in our heads, our collective human hive-mind. If there are rules, we’re the ones making them. We can change them whenever we want to.

I don’t deserve them. Her warm memories. I’d like to paint them over the bare plaster walls of my soul, but everything I paint seems to peel.

One mistake, one brief lapse of my newfound judgment—that’s all it took to unravel everything. What a massive responsibility, being a moral creature.

“Who decided life has to be a nightmare? Who wrote that fucking rule? We can fix it, we’ve

just never tried before! We’ve always been too busy and selfish and scared!”

I’m not a general or a colonel or a builder of cities. I’m just a corpse who wants not to be.

We crave a greater science. We want to be proven wrong.

“What do we do, R?” Julie finally looks at me. Her voice is shaky, her eyes are raw, but she doesn’t surrender to tears. “Are we stupid to think we can do anything? You made me start hoping again, but here we are, and I think we’re about to die. So what do we do?”

and I understand that I love her. And if she is everything, maybe that’s answer enough.

The chance to start over, to live right, to love right, to burn up in a fiery cloud and never again be buried in the mud.

There’s a shiver in our legs, a tremor like the Earth speeding up, spinning off into uncharted orbits. Scary, isn’t it? But what wonderful thing didn’t start out scary?

I don’t know what the next page is for you, but whatever it is for me I swear I’m not going to fuck it up. I’m not going to yawn off in the middle of a sentence and hide it in a drawer. Not this time. Peel off these dusty wool blankets of apathy and antipathy and cynical desiccation. I want life in all its stupid sticky rawness.

not going to yawn off in the middle of a sentence and hide it in a drawer. Not this time. Peel off these dusty wool blankets of apathy and antipathy and cynical desiccation...

We have big plans. Oh yes. We’re fumbling in the dark, but at least we’re in motion.

The sky is blue. The grass is green. The sun is warm on our skin. We smile, because this is how we save the world.

We will exhume ourselves. We will fight the curse and break it. We will cry and bleed and lust and love, and we will cure death. We will be the cure. Because we want it.