The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Vol. 2 Quotes

“What you do with your time alive defines you, Reader, but hear me, I beg you, when I say that you are not done being defined.”
― Daniel Kraus, The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Vol. 2: Empire Decayed

“It's funny, isn't it? While we were distracted by the silly scraps that make up human history, you and I became eternal, impervious to rot, infinity itself.”
― Daniel Kraus, The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Vol. 2: Empire Decayed

“If nothing else, books are conversations from beyond the grave. Am I anything at all, Reader, besides this manuscript you hold?”
― Daniel Kraus, The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Vol. 2: Empire Decayed

“What you do with your time alive defines you, Reader, but hear me, I beg you, when I say that you are not done being defined. Go out; break things. Go further; repair them. Break hundreds of hearts. Have thousands of children. Discover awe in a tangle of weeds; find delight in the pattern of a roll of mass-produced paper towels; live, Reader, live; live as hard as I died, and only then I will be happy.”
― Daniel Kraus, The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Vol. 2: Empire Decayed

“How voraciously quick it was that boys became men and men became dust.”
― Daniel Kraus, The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Vol. 2: Empire Decayed

“We are one miracle inter-linked with another, and another, and another, entire heavens located upon this single page as well as inside the fingertip that turns it.”
― Daniel Kraus, The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Vol. 2: Empire Decayed

“I marched along, foot after foot, imagining my own autopsy. It would look much like America's; flesh that had turned too quickly for someone so young and now emulsified at the brink of spoil.”
― Daniel Kraus, The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Vol. 2: Empire Decayed

“Amerika's story is always going to be yours. White. Male. Probably rich. You're Rome and we all know what happened to Rome. Empire gets too big, empire falls.”
― Daniel Kraus, The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Vol. 2: Empire Decayed

“I am, I believe, a young man on whom a grand joke is being played, fated to live one century, perhaps a second, perhaps a third, only to be scrubbed and rescrubbed from the record, to exit, if I ever do, as if I'd never existed at all.”
― Daniel Kraus, The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Vol. 2: Empire Decayed