David Wellington > Quotes

“Vampires, real vampires, didn't nibble on the necks of nubile young virgins. They tore people to pieces and sucked the blood out of the chunks. ”
― David Wellington, 99 Coffins

“I will not negotiate with the undead!”
― David Wellington, Monster Island

“A man. A dead man. A dead man with no arms.”
― David Wellington, Monster Nation

“Shit rolls downhill. Bureaucracy rolls faster.”
― David Wellington

“If somebody wants to be your enemy, there's only one thing you can do. You give them exactly what they want. It confuses them and makes them wonder what you're up to.”
― David Wellington, 13 Bullets

“It doesn't matter what we choose. It simply matters what we are.”
― David Wellington, Monster Island

“You have a wife?” Caxton demanded.
“I killed a vampire twenty years ago, and another one last night. I had to keep myself busy in the meantime,” he told her.”
― David Wellington, 13 Bullets

“Wow. So what was the vampire like?” “Pale. Big. Toothy,” the trooper answered.”
― David Wellington, 13 Bullets

“Do we have a plan?” she asked.
“Yes,” he told her. “Shoot everything that moves.”
― David Wellington, 13 Bullets

“There are those among us who find monsters quite attractive, Vesta said.”
― David Wellington (Vampire Zero)

“In the dark ages a vampire could live for decades unopposed, feeding nightly on people whose only defense was to bar their windows and lock their doors and always, always, be home before sundown. When it became necessary to slay a vampire there was only one way it could be done. There were no guns and certainly no jackhammers at the time. The vampire slayers would gather up every able-bodied male in the community. The mob of them would go against the vampire with torches and spears and sticks if they had to. Very many of them would die in the first onslaught but eventually enough of them would pile on top to hold the vampire down.”
― David Wellington, 13 Bullets

“He did not waste time greeting her, but fell upon her at once with a vicious snarl. With his powerful jaws he tore at her, pulled her apart. He ripped open her guts and they spilled with a rank smell across the broken road surface. He tore off her leg and threw it into the darkness like so much poisoned meat.
The pain was intense, but she could not complain or fight him off. She lacked the energy to even raise her head. He tore and bit and ripped her apart and she could only experience it passively, as if from some remove.
Somehow she knew that he wasn’t killing her.
That he was saving her.
When he was done, when all the silver was torn out of her body and cast away from her, she breathed a little easier, and then she sank into a fitful sleep. He stood watch over her throughout the night, occasionally howling as the moon rode its arc across the night sky. Occasionally he would lick her face, her ears, to wake her up, to keep her from fading out of existence altogether. Once when he could not wake her he grabbed her by the back of the neck and shook her violently until her eyes cracked open and her tongue leapt from her mouth and she croaked out a whine of outrage.”
― David Wellington, Frostbite

“What’s that smell?” Reynolds asked.
That smell is the stuff they grow mushrooms in.”
DeForrest sniffed the air. “Shit?” he asked.
Captain Suzie shrugged. “Manure.”
― David Wellington, 13 Bullets

“One of the women took his arm and smiled into his face until he looked at her. “We’re going to dance in the woods later, when the moon comes up. You’ll have to join us, of course,” she said. She batted her eyelashes and added, “It’s a full moon, so we’ll go skyclad.”
Simon frowned, trying to work out what she was saying. “Naked, you mean.” His mouth fluttered as if he was trying to decide whether to grin sheepishly or lasciviously.”
― David Wellington, 32 Fangs

“..every once in a while, maybe twice a year, I dream of blood. It tastes like copper pennies on your tongue. It’s hot, hotter than you expect, and very wet at first, but it clots even as it fills your mouth. It sticks in your throat but you swallow it down, you can feel it stringy and dark in the back of your throat but you force it down so you can have some more, another mouthful, and another. I know it so well now. The dryness of it, the clots in your teeth. The need.”
― David Wellington, 13 Bullets

“Caxton crawled into the back while Arkeley took the front passenger seat. His fused vertebrae trumped her sprained ribs, he announced.”
― David Wellington, 13 Bullets

“My pleasure. Listen,” he called after her, “this is as far as I can go. They poisoned the water out there and I can’t follow you now. If you do see Powell, will you give him a message for me?”
“Sure,” she said, turning around. “Tell him I have his boots in my truck. In case he’s looking for ’em.”
Chey smiled. It felt wrong on her face, but she liked it all the same. “I’ll do that.”
― David Wellington, Frostbite

“Say again, over,” he announced.
“I was saying that I’m going from here on foot,” Arkeley told them. “You can follow however you choose but this place was never meant for a military parade.”
“He’s making fun of your truck,” Caxton told Captain Suzie.”
― David Wellington, 13 Bullets

“Nothing lasts forever, not even the horrors in this life.”
― David Wellington, Positive

“Hey.” He glanced away from her, instead looking down at the coffin. He looked back at her and raised his eyebrows. “Want a peek?”
― David Wellington, 13 Bullets

“He looked right into her and then he said, “In a second I’m going to ask you if you’re okay. Your answer is extremely important. If you can keep fighting, or at least keep running, you have to say ‘yes’. Otherwise we have to run away and let them win this one. Now. Are you okay?”
― David Wellington, 13 Bullets

“Sometimes we call it ‘Extra Chunky,’ too.”
“Why’s that?” she finally asked. “Because,” DeForrest said, barely able to contain his mirth, “when you run over a hippy with this thing, extra chunky is about all that’s left.”
― David Wellington, 13 Bullets

“Nothing stands still, in space. Every object that exists, exists in constant motion. Moons orbit planets, planets orbit stars. Stars orbit the super-massive black holes at the centers of galaxies, and galaxies trace their own tracks across the sky, expanding ever outward. Every rock, every cloud of gas between the stars, every person, every sub-atomic particle in the universe is moving, all the time.”
― David Wellington, Paradise-1

“For the first time I got a good look at the woman who, despite avowed intentions, had saved my life. I was surprised first to see that she was old. Her hair was silver, tied back behind her head in a no-nonsense bun. Her face was lined with wrinkles. On her head she wore a hat with a very wide brim, a kind of hat I’d never seen before. She also wore tight-fitting black pants and black leather boots and a brown leather jacket. A patch on her shoulder read PENNSYLVANIA STATE POLICE TROOPER. On the front of her jacket was a nameplate that read CAXTON.”
― David Wellington, Positive

“They feared the ideas in the books. Burning the books was a way to express how terrified they were of anyone who didn’t think the same way they did.”
― David Wellington, Revenant-X

“as silent and malevolent as a house cat blinking in a patch of sun.”
― David Wellington, The Last Astronaut

“All of Europe, as far as we knew, was gone. It might as well not be there anymore. Russia was gone. By the time you got to wondering where America went there just wasn't any more room for it in your brain. A world without America just couldn't happen - the global economy would collapse. Every two penny warlord and dictator in the Third World would have a field day. It just wasn't possible. It would mean global chaos. It would mean the of history as we knew it.
Which was exactly what happened.”
― David Wellington, Monster Island

“There was only motion. Planets, stars, galaxies—always they turned, they rotated, revolved. Rocks tumbled between worlds, comets’ tails twisted and braided in the stellar wind. The flow of charged particles swept through infinity. The endless howling cry of stars, the cold and ever-falling shafts of cosmic rays. There were eddies, vortices, currents, and that was all. Things changed over time, mutation and metamorphosis swirling across seconds hours centuries millennia, even on the scale of billions of years nothing stood still, nothing ever would.”
― David Wellington, The Last Astronaut

“Without light, our circadian rhythms quickly get decalibrated and we lose all sense of time. You can sleep for an entire day and think you’ve just taken a quick catnap. You can be down underground for months and think it was just weeks. Artificial light doesn’t help, because you can turn that on and off. If you take away the difference between night and day, you start pushing the human mind right to the brink of insanity.”
― David Wellington, The Last Astronaut

“I threw away a whole career, once. You know that.” “Yeah. I remember,” she said. It was what had brought them together, actually. The day they’d met he’d looked so – not sad. Just confused. Befuddled was the word. Like he’d had the whole world in the palm of his hand and he’d just blundered and dropped it.”
― David Wellington, Paradise-1