Apocalyptic Quotes

“One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.
The tale is the map that is the territory.
You must remember this.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“I like living in my head because in there, everyone is kind and innocent. Once you start integrating yourself into the world, you realize that people are nasty, mean creatures. They're worse than zombies. People try to crush your soul and destroy your happiness, but zombies just want to have a little nibble of your brain.”
― J. Cornell Michel, Jordan's Brains: A Zombie Evolution

“The pretty ones are usually unhappy. They expect everyone to be enamored of their beauty. How can a person be content when their happiness lies in someone else's hands, ready to be crushed at any moment? Ordinary-looking people are far superior, because they are forced to actually work hard to achieve their goals, instead of expecting people to fall all over themselves to help them.”
― J. Cornell Michel, Jordan's Brains: A Zombie Evolution

“The world is a goddamned evil place, the strong prey on the weak, the rich on the poor; I’ve given up hope that there is a God that will save us all. How am I supposed to believe that there’s a heaven and a hell when all I see now is hell.”
― Aaron B. Powell, Doomsday Diaries III: Luke the Protector

“No foot, but strapped to his thigh was what looked like a wooden table leg. It looked ridiculous; the idea was completely idiotic. A naked pirate who couldn’t even afford a proper peg leg.”
― William Kely McClung, LOOP

“Great. Abducted by aliens. She’d never live this one down. She wondered if they would dissect her. Maybe grab a steak of the tender parts and cook her up. Any sex stuff was too weird and horrible to think about, though it had been awhile. What the hell did she know? Brad Pitt. Surely, he wasn’t entirely human. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.”
― William Kely McClung, LOOP

“You know that the things you put it your head stay there, right?'
'Yeah. But you remember some things, don't you?'
'Yeah. You remember the things you want to forget and forget the things you want to remember.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Abdul and Mohamed sat down, chilling the conversation at the table. They spoke in Urdu, unaware Lily understood them. When her expression changed subtly, Abdul noticed and switched to speaking English with a mundane comment.”
― Dennis K. Hausker, Secrets: in a corrupted society

“How can we be alive and not wonder about the stories we knit together this place we call the world? Without stories our universe is merely rocks and clouds and lava and blackness. It's a village scraped raw by warm waters leaving not a trace of what existed before.”
― Douglas Coupland, Generation A

“The world was already a miserable place in the spring of that cursed year. The New Depression was at its height. Stocks fell, jobs were lost, and consumer consumption fell in a corporate death spiral as the aging technoczars were revealed to have feet of clay. Financial institutions underreacted, the government overreacted, and a society living on borrowed time paid for with borrowed dollars failed. Hard times and hunger came to the Western world, which was all the more of a shock because the generation that survived the last financial collapse had virtually died out.”
― E.E. Knight, Way of the Wolf

“Not all the magic of earth is benevolent.”
― Alden Bell

“The white flashed back into a red ball in the southeast. They all knew what it was. It was Orlando, or McCoy Base, or both. It was the power supply for Timucuan County.

Thus the lights went out, and in that moment civilization in Fort Repose retreated a hundred years.

So ended The Day.”
― Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon

“...he was a scream wrapped up in straw, a little, weak, vicious thing gnashing inside a monstrous facade...”
― Robert R. McCammon, Swan Song

“So what if I don't learn algebra?'

'Someday schools will be open again,' Mom said. 'Things will be normal. You need to do your work now for when that happens.'

'That's never going to happen,' Jon said. 'And even if schools do open up somewhere, they're not going to open up here. There aren't enough people left.'

'We don't know how many people are like us, holed up, making do until times get better.'

'I bet whoever they are, they aren't studying algebra,' Jon said.”
― Susan Beth Pfeffer, This World We Live In

“I love a good story about everyone dying.”
― Sadie Hartmann, 101 Horror Books to Read Before You're Murdered

“Mortimer had maxed three credit cards stocking the cave with canned goods and medical supplies and tools and everything a man needed to live through the end of the world. There were more than a thousand books along shelves in the driest part of the cave. There used to be several boxes of pornography until Mortimer realized that he'd spent nearly ten days in a row sitting in the cave masturbating. He burned the dirty magazines to keep from doing some terrible whacking injury to himself.”
― Victor Gischler, Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse

“Is the music broke, Mommy?”
― Edward M. Wolfe, Hell on Ice

“Maybe we've been too silly to deserve a world like this," he said.
The scientist said, "That's absolutely and precisely right.”
― Nevil Shute, On the Beach

“For every path that leads to success, there are a million billion paths to failure. The Anchor’s quest is to live her life again and again and again until she finds the one true path. Only then can she shepherd humanity from bloodshed and destruction to peace and harmony.”
― Louise Lacaille, The Time Gene: Book One of The Immortal Cosmos series

“Acababa de aprender que debía tenerle más miedo a las personas vivas que a los zombies.”
― Angie Nell, Quimera

“We cannot plan a party for the apocalypse
because friends of the apocalypse know
the apocalypse always shows up
uninvited with a half-eaten bag of chips.”
― Kelli Russell Agodon, Dialogues with Rising Tides

“The interstices of time are highly complex. Time is mutable, and one small step for a man sets mankind on a radically different path. "There are billions of paths, twists and fork-turns. Some lead to triumph, and others to doom. The one we have trodden has risked our annihilation as a species.”
― Louise Lacaille, The Time Gene: Book One of The Immortal Cosmos series

“Tears pooled in his eyes. Light or dark, awake and asleep, the scenes were the same. Busy streets that by dawn would be charred rubble and molten ash. Men with briefcases, waving goodbye to their wives, who would never return. Mothers kissing the foreheads of sleeping children who would never waken. For so it would always be in a universe where the Megaton was Lord.”
― Louise Lacaille, The Time Gene: Book One of The Immortal Cosmos series

“Every time someone got wounded, bombed or hurt in the news, she could not stop the pervasive sense of guilt that she ought to have stopped it. It haunted her morning, noon and night. For what purpose had she been given this gift? And did anyone else share it?
What if it wasn’t a gift, but a curse?”
― Louise Lacaille, The Time Gene: Book One of The Immortal Cosmos series

“I am a door to pass through, not a final destination,” said Death after much time had passed, “a moment and not a lifetime. The road leads on beyond me; it is a path we all must take, but it stretches far further than you would ever believe.”
― Sophia Conway, His Last Companion

“Even nature; the restless waves, irregular trees, and stars all out of line show that chaos can be beautiful!”
― Sophia Conway, His Last Companion

“En aquel momento no podías encerrarte y pretender que así sobrevivirías. Lo único que podías hacer era encontrar un refugio para esconderte y luchar contra los muertos.”
― Angie Nell, Quimera

“Me había quedado sola en un mundo muerto.”
― Angie Nell, Quimera

“Solo me faltaba un cartel luminoso en el que se leyera: Todos los zombies que estén en un radio de un kilómetro que vengan a por mí, carne fresca y fácil a vuestro alcance.”
― Angie Nell, Quimera

“It is also striking and worth noting that this apocalyptic message comes to be toned down, and then virtually eliminated, and finally preached against (allegedly by Jesus!) in our later sources. And it is not hard to figure out why. If Jesus predicted that the imminent apocalypse would arrive within his own generation, before his disciples had all died, what was one to think a generation later when in fact it had not arrived? One might conclude that Jesus was wrong. But if one wanted to stay true to him, one might change the message that he proclaimed so that he no longer spoke about the coming apocalypse. So it is no accident that our final canonical Gospel, John, written after that first generation, no longer has Jesus proclaim an apocalyptic message. He preaches something else entirely. Even later, in a book like the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus preaches directly against an apocalyptic point of view (sayings 2, 113). As time went on, the apocalyptic message came to be seen as misguided, or even dangerous. And so the traditions of Jesus’s preaching were changed. But in our earliest multiply attested sources, there it is for all to see.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God