WARM BODIES - ISAAC MARION

Warm Bodies - Pg 238

We are silent for a while. We are lying in the grass. Behind us, the battered old Mercedes waits patiently, whispering to us in sizzles and pings as its engine cools. Mercey, Julie named it. Who is this woman lying next to me, so overflowing with life she can grant it to a car" 

Warm Bodies - Pg 228

"I don't know exactly why," he says, "but I'm thrilled to know you, R." 

Warm Bodies - Pg 225

Rosso is struggling for breath, clutching his wrist and ribs, unable to move. He gives Julie a look that pleads forgiveness, not just for this failure but for all the failures leading to it. All the years of knowing and not acting. 

Warm Bodies - Pg 205

We are several hundred monsters and a hundred-pound girl, standing on the edge of their city with fire in our eyes. Deep under our feet Earth holds its molten breath, while the bones of countless generations watch us and wait. 

Warm Bodies - Pg 153

She catches my eye and gives me a sad smile, as if to apologize for not warning me. 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, gibing them firm, bone-crunching handshakes. 

Warm Bodies - Pg 151

Out here, with the door shut behind us, the pulsing noise of human affairs is gone, replaced by the stoic silence of the truly dead. 

Warm Bodies - Pg 121

Island avenue, where they built the courtyard for the community meetings, where "they" became "we," or so we believed. We cast our votes and raised our leaders, charming men and women with white teeth and silver tongues, and we shoved our many hopes and fears into their hands, believing those hands were strong because they had firm handshakes. They failed us, always. There was no way they could not fail us--they were human, and more importantly, so were we. 

Warm Bodies - Pg 109

I wonder if this is what the world smelled like when it was new, centuries before smokestacks. It frustrates and fascinates me that we'll never know for sure, that despite the best efforts of historians and scientists and poets, there are some things we'll just never know. What the first song sounded like. How it felt to see the first photograph. Who kissed the first kiss, and if it was any good. 

Warm Bodies - Pg 98

You're going to do those things, R murmurs down to Julie, and he and I swap places again. Julie looks up at me, the corpse in the clouds, floating over the ocean like a restless spirit. She gives me a radiant smile, and I know it's not really her, I know nothing I say here will ever escape the confines of my own skull, but I say it anyway. You're going to be strong and beautiful and brilliant, and you're going to live forever. You're going to change the world. 

Warm Bodies - Pg 90

We are both on the very edges of the mattress, about four feet of space between us. I get the feeling that it's not just my ghoulish nature that makes her so wary. Living or Dead, virile or impotent, I sill appear to be a man, and maybe she thinks I'll act the same as any other man would, lying so close to a beautiful woman. Maybe she thinks I'll try to take things from her. That I'll slither over and try to consume her. 

Warm Bodies - Pg 63

   "Then me this isn't the end of the world."   She lies there for a minute, looking up at the sky. Then she sits up and pulls one of her earbuds out of her tangled blond hair. She gently plugs it into my ear.    The warbled strumming of a broken guitar, the swelling of an orchestra, the oohs and ahhs of a studio choir, and John Lennon's weary, woozy voice, singing limitless undying lobe. Everyone playing this song is now bones in a grave, but here they are anyway, exciting and inviting me, calling me on and on. The final fadeout breaks something inside me, and tears squeeze out of my eyes. The brilliant truth and the inescapable lie, sititng side by side just like Julie and I. Can I have both? Can I survive in this doomed world and still love Julie, who dreams above it? For this moment at least, tied to her brain by the white wire between our ears, I feel like I can.    Nothing's gonna change my world, Lennon chants, over and over. Nothing's gonna change my world.    Julie sings a high harmony and I murmur a low. There on the hot white roof of humanity's last outpost, we look out over our rapidly, hopelessly, irretrievable changing world, and we sing:    Nothing's gonna change my world. Nothing's gonna change my world. 

Warm Bodies - Pg 57

   Slowly, I stand up and go over to my record player. I pull out one of my favorite LPs, an obscure compilation of Sinatra songs from various albums. I don't know why I like this one so much. I once spent three full days motionless in front of it, just watching the vinyl spin. I know the grooves in this record better than the grooves ini my palms. People used to say music was the greatest communicator; I wonder if this is still true in this posthuman, posthumous age. I put the record on and begin to move the needle as it plays, skipping measures, skipping songs, dancing through the spirals to find the words I want to fill the air. The phrases are off key, off tempo, punctuated by loud scratches like the ripping of fascia tissue, but the tone is flawless. Frank's buttery baritone says it better than my croaky vocals ever could had I the diction of a Kennedy. I stand over the record, cutting and pasting the contents of my heart into an airborne collage. 

   I don't care if you are called--scratch--when people say you're--scratch--wicked witchcraft--scratch--don't change a hair for me, not if you--scratch--'cause you're sensational--scratch--you just the way you are--scratch--you're sensational... sensational... That's all... 

Warm Bodies - Pg 55

I instantly regret speaking his name. Rolling off my tongue, the syllables taste like his blood. 

Warm Bodies - Pg 55

   "There's this theory that you guys eat brains because you get to relive the person's life. True?"   I shrug, trying not to squirm. I feel like a toddler caught finger-painting the walls. Or killing dozens of people. 

Warm Bodies - Pg 53

I start to shrug and then stop myself, with some difficulty. How can I possible explain this to her in words? The slow death of Quixote. The abandoning of quests, the surrenders of desire, the settling in and settling down that is the inevitable fate of the Dead. 

Warm Bodies - Pg 36

My kids are next in line. They watch the current lesson intently, sometimes standing on tiptoes to see, but they aren't afraid. They are younger than the rest and will probably be matched against someone too frail to put up a fight, but they don't know this, and it's not why they're unafraid. When the entire world is built on death and horror, when existence is a constant state of panic, it's hard to get worked up about any one thing. Specific fears have become irrelevant. We've replaced them with a smothering blanket far worse. 

Warm Bodies - Pg 4

It does make me sad that we've forgotten our names. Out of everything, this seems to me the most tragic. I miss my own and I mourn for everyone else's, because I'd like to love them, but I don't know who they are. 

Warm Bodies - Pg 1

Mine might have started with an "R," but that's all I have now. It's funny because back when I was alive, I was always forgetting other people's names. My friend "M" says the irony of being a zombie is that everything is funny, but you can't smile because your lips have rotted off. 

Warm Bodies - Pg 1

I'm sorry I can't properly introduce myself, but I don't have a name anymore. Hardly any of us do. We lose them like car keys, forget them like anniversaries.