I, Zombie Quotes

“Health and understanding seem to intersect in one’s forties, the one peaking as the other begins its slow ascent. Maybe you’ll know one day what you should’ve taken the time to appreciate.”
― Hugh Howey, I, Zombie

“Her twitching muscles felt near enough like wracking sobs. Struggling on that table felt near enough like times she’d clutched her knees and sobbed quietly in the tub. Life and love. When the bad parts crept in, sometimes she wished it would end. Wished there was some quick way out for cowards. She loved her husband, wasn’t sure how not to, but sometimes she sat in the tub with the water running dangerously hot and wanted out. Like now, just wanting to die.”
― Hugh Howey, I, Zombie

“Emotions don’t know how to stitch back the way flesh could. How do you go to a person, your wife of two decades, and tell her you want to start over again? How do you say, “Forget everything we’ve got together. Forget the kids and the fights and all the good times, too. I take it all back.” How do you do that? It ain’t a lizard’s tail, those years. It ain’t something you walk away from and start over.”
― Hugh Howey, I, Zombie

“Little fictions. That’s what her father called them. Not lies, just stories to twist the brain into a new shape, to allow the light to spill in with a different color, to throw rainbows instead of shadows.”
― Hugh Howey, I, Zombie

“How could any of them not see where they were going? They’d been going around and around in tiny circles, had been for years, years that sat heavy in the gut of the living. And this was what made stomachs turn: it was the weight of all that time wasted. It was the seconds and minutes and hours, the true nectar of life, gorged on hungrily and thoughtlessly, forever undigestible, everyone hungry for more.”
― Hugh Howey, I, Zombie

“Youthful vigor becomes more rot than wisdom. Hopeful optimism is battered by harsh reality. Health and understanding seem to intersect in one’s forties, the one peaking as the other begins its slow ascent. Maybe you’ll know one day what you should’ve taken the time to appreciate. Maybe it’ll be when your knees start popping, when your hands no longer work like they should. It probably won’t be any sooner.”
― Hugh Howey, I, Zombie

“Michael had watched his father crawl inside a bottle and die there just so he didn’t have to get up and go to work. It wasn’t long before his mom retreated behind a vacant gaze, leaving him and his sister to pay the bills, to change her stinking bags, to roll her from one sunny patch by the window to another. His mother had become a potted plant they fretted over. No, that wasn’t right. Couldn’t plants at least turn their heads and follow the sun? Weren’t they better than her in that way?”
― Hugh Howey, I, Zombie

“Time slipped away in a familiar manner, and love dwindled as it was tossed back and forth in the form of arguments. It could only go away, everything she saw and everywhere she looked. Money. It disappeared from her accounts no matter how hard she tried to save. Time and love and wealth and anything worth building or wrapping one’s arms around, trying to hold on to it all, eroding like the cascade of sand between two palms, stolen by the breeze.”
― Hugh Howey, I, Zombie

“A family is more than just its members,” their father had said. “Together, we become something different.”
― Hugh Howey, I, Zombie

“This is before the years stretched out into what feels like a forever. When sick men refuse to die. When innocent men find something to be guilty of. When years jumble together like water beading up on glass.”
― Hugh Howey, I, Zombie

“origami nests until a brave soul—the sports page or classifieds—tore off and flapped to freedom.”
― Hugh Howey, I, Zombie

“The Swooping Birds that Caught Her Eyes”
― Hugh Howey, I, Zombie

“removed her flesh piece by gory piece. They aren’t here to save me, she realized.”
― Hugh Howey, I, Zombie

“his balding head a tiny raft bobbing on a sea of pedestrians.”
― Hugh Howey, I, Zombie

“However it started, there was a chain of blame that linked them all together.”
― Hugh Howey, I, Zombie

“He had been fourteen when the planes hit.”
― Hugh Howey, I, Zombie

“a picked-clean skeleton sitting there in one of ‘em with its seatbelt still on like it might crank the engine”
― Hugh Howey, I, Zombie

“the streets outside full of the silent traffic of darting candy bar wrappers”
― Hugh Howey, I, Zombie

“sizing up the two young couples they’d murdered in their sleep.”
― Hugh Howey, I, Zombie

“Unaware that anyone other than her suffered at all.”
― Hugh Howey, I, Zombie

“Cars lay scattered like some god-child had been playing with them before losing interest,”
― Hugh Howey, I, Zombie

“The greenery beckoned. It invited her in with the scent of hidden survivors,”
― Hugh Howey, I, Zombie

“What was it about this city, with its endless possibilities, that elicited such limited routines?”
― Hugh Howey, I, Zombie

“When sick men refuse to die. When innocent men find something to be guilty of.”
― Hugh Howey, I, Zombie