Josh Malerman Quotes

“You are saving their lives for a life not worth living.”

“Man is the creature he fears.”

“Maybe a thing has to be smart enough to lose its mind.”

“They are monsters, Malorie thinks. But she knows they are more than this. They are infinity.”

“Your baby is smarter than you think.”

“The moment between deciding to open your eyes and then actually doing it is as scary a thing as there is in the new world.”

“Once she told me I looked like the sun to her, because of my hair. I asked her if I shined like the sun, and she told me, ‘No, Daddy, you shine more like the moon, when it’s dark outside.”

“It’s better to face madness with a plan than to sit still and let it take you in pieces.”

“How can she expect her children to dream as big as the stars if they can’t lift their heads to gaze upon them?”

“In a world where you can’t open your eyes, isn’t a blindfold all you could ever hope for?”

“The children have never seen the world outside their home. Not even through the windows. And Malorie hasn’t looked in more than four years. Four years.”

“The chicken wire has served as armor, protecting the children not from what could see them, but from what they could see.”

“You can smell it, too. Death. Dying. Decay. The sky is falling, the sky is dying, the sky is dead.”

“We left because some people choose to wait for news and others make their own.”

“Is he friendly?” Tom says quietly. “I’ve discovered,” Jules says, “that a dog will become fast friends with the people who feed him.”

“Rowing blindfolded is even harder than Malorie had imagined. Many times already, the rowboat has run into the banks and got stuck for a period of several minutes. In that time she was besieged by visions of unseen hands reaching for the blindfolds that cover the children’s eyes. Fingers coming up and out of the water, from the mud where the river meets the earth. The children did not scream, they did not whine. They are too patient for that.”

“Only a box of birds, Malorie thinks. Yet, it does feel like progress.”

“‘This,’ Malorie says, placing a bloodied hand on the Girl’s head, ‘this is Olympia.’ The Girl looks at Malorie quickly. She blushes. She smiles. She likes it. ‘And this,’ Malorie says, pressing the Boy to her body, ‘is Tom.’ He grins, shy and happy.”

“Robin was a great kid. Smarter than her father at eight years old. She liked the oddest things. Like the instructions for a toy more than the toy itself. The credits of a movie instead of the movie. The way something was written. An expression on my face.”

“A grisly story, but one whose notoriety Malorie attributes to the seemingly senseless way the Internet has of making random occurrences famous.”

“Think about that, Malorie. It all kind of happened in a row, each step allowed the next step to happen. All because we weren’t stagnant. We took risks. Now you’ve got to do the same.”