Post Apocalypse Quotes

“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

“Maruman does not loll.”
― Isobelle Carmody, The Keeping Place

“We all love after-the-bomb stories. If we didn't, why would there be so many of them? There's something attractive about all those people being gone, about wandering in a depopulated world, scrounging cans of Campbell's pork and beans, defending one's family from marauders. But some secret part of us thinks it would be good to survive. All those other folks will die. That's what after-the-bomb stories are all about.”
― John Varley

“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

“I’m just happy to have experienced life; to have had a beautiful son and to have loved.”
― Aaron B. Powell, Voluntary

“Who would want to be the prey in a world full of hunters?”
― Alexia Purdy, Disarming

“When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“What did you do for them, Bone? Teach them to read and write? Help them rebuild, give them Christ, help restore a culture? Did you remember to warn them that it could never be Eden?”
― Walter M. Miller Jr, A Canticle for Leibowitz

“Make me a weapon,” I whispered as he pulled away. “Make it so I never have to dream about this again—make it so we can have this…forever.”
― Cassandra Giovanni, In Between Seasons

“When the dust settles and we look back,
will we be okay with what we see?"
End Times Alaska by Craig Martelle”
― Craig Martelle, Endure

“I'd say it was a relief to have at last nothing, nothing, but I was too hollow to register relief, too empty to carry it.”
― Peter Heller, The Dog Stars

“There’s no god, it’s the elements that control this world and everything on it.”
― Scott A. Butler, H2Zero: Part One

“This is a dystopia, but also a post-apocalypse. The dystopia survived the apocalypse, nobody can get their head around it—too bad! You can do post-apocalypse things, survivalist stuff, rationing, killing, new tribalism, but you can also go the dystopia route, struggle against the decadent lords and masters, smash the seductive machine that’s controlling your head. Just because you’re crazy doesn’t mean you’re not also stupid, and neither precludes the possibility that you’ve got your boot on the neck of someone even worse off.”
― Jonathan Lethem

“Hooray, I wake from yesterday,
Alive but the war is here to stay,
So my love Katherina and me
Decide to take our last walk through the noise to the sea,
Not to die but to be reborn,
Away from a land so battered and torn…
Forever…”
― Jimi Hendrix

“The main element crucial for the survival of life is also a demon in disguise; it will snatch your life away as quickly as you were given it.”
― Scott A. Butler, H2Zero: Part One

“Do I look that bad?’ I said, my voice quavering with the rejection that I was ashamed for even caring about. ‘Is that what this is all about? How ugly I look?’
Patrick kept his eyes on the back wall of the cave.
‘If you really have to know, it’s the opposite of that,’ he said, his voice taking on a tender tone. ‘I think you are the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”
― Vanessa Garden, Carrier

“My dad had always said to not trust something unless it’s taken a tumble in the dirt. He’d meant it for people, and for things. Shiny and new didn’t exist for humankind any more.”
― Katherine McIntyre, Snatched

“If you want to survive, you're going to have to learn to be more ruthless.”
― suzanne Lowe

“He continued to move forward, skirting a pocket of radiation that had not died in the four years since last he had come this way.
They came upon a place where the sands were fused into a glassy sea, and he slowed as he began its passage, peering ahead after the craters and chasms it contained.
Three more rockfalls assailed him before the heavens split themselves open and revealed a bright-blue light, edged with violet. The dark curtains rolled back toward the Poles, and the roaring and the gunfire reports diminished. A lavender glow remained in the north, and a green sun dipped toward the horizon at his back.
They had ridden it out, and he killed the infras, pushed back his goggles, and switched on the normal night lamps.
The desert would be bad enough, all by itself.
Something big and batlike swooped through the tunnel of his lights and was gone. He ignored its passage. Five minutes later it made a second pass, this time much closer, and he fired a magnesium flare. A black shape, perhaps forty feet across, was illuminated, and he gave it two five-second bursts from the fifty-calibers, and it fell to the ground and did not return again.
To the squares, this was Damnation Alley. To Hell Tanner, this was still the parking lot.”
― Roger Zelazny

“The Khawla historian says the people of this planet were like a virus—multiplying endlessly, consuming every resource they could wrench from land and sky, acting as if all they could survey was theirs for the taking and the ruining. Every time their planet cried out, they ignored its pleas. Instead of curbing their wasteful desires—their fossil fuels and their petroleum-fueled lives—they simply expanded their settlements, moved to new places, plundered more ground, until their land could bear it no longer and erupted in fire. There were many among the young who had spoken the truth, who gave warning of what their future could hold, but on this planet, old men didn’t plan for futures they knew they wouldn’t be there to enjoy. They couldn’t see past themselves.”
― Dhonielle Clayton, A Universe of Wishes: A We Need Diverse Books Anthology

“The little car was soon free of the city, for the smear of suburbia that had once lain along the western highways for miles was gone. During the Plague Years of the eighties, when in some areas not one person in twenty remained alive, the suburbs were not a good place to be. Miles from the supermart, no gas for the car, and all the split-level ranch homes around you full of the dead. No help, no food. Packs of huge status-symbol dogs—Afghans, Alsatians, Great Danes—running wild across the lawns ragged with burdock and plantain. Picture window cracked. Who’ll come and mend the broken glass? People had huddled back into the old core of the city; and once the suburbs had been looted, they burned. Like Moscow in 1812, acts of God or vandalism: they were no longer wanted, and they burned. Fireweed, from which bees make the finest honey of all, grew acre after acre over the sites of Kensington Homes West, Sylvan Oak Manor Estates, and Valley Vista Park.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“The Khawla historian says the people of this planet were like a virus—multiplying endlessly, consuming every resource they could wrench from land and sky, acting as if all they could survey was theirs for the taking and the ruining. Every time their planet cried out, they ignored its pleas. Instead of curbing their wasteful desires—their fossil fuels and their petroleum-fueled lives—they simply expanded their settlements, moved to new places, plundered more ground, until their land could bear it no longer and erupted in fire. There were many among the young who had spoken the truth, who gave warning of what their future could hold, but on this planet, old men didn’t plan for futures they knew they wouldn’t be there to enjoy. They couldn’t see past themselves.”
― Samira Ahmed, A Universe of Wishes: A We Need Diverse Books Anthology

“Until I saw what happened to Mongo, I thought that getting canceled was the worst thing that could happen. Wrong. Being dead and not knowing it is much, much worse.”
― Rodman Philbrick, The Last Book in the Universe

“You need to rethink your definition of 'nice'."
"Why?"
"Because if we were stuck together I'd leave you behind. I'm not your 'nice terrant.' I could kill you if I wanted to."
"So nice.”
― Heather Chambers, Earth Sucks

“Karl leaned forward, pressing a tired but tender kiss to Nessa’s trembling lips. They were chilled by the cold and damp with sweat. Far from disgust him, this evidence that she was still alive in his arms compelled him to deepen the kiss. They pulled away at the same time. Those three special words stuck in the back of his throat. Instead, it was Nessa who spoke. Her tone was filled with wonder. “I thought I lost you.”

Karl huffed a laugh. Almost of its own volition, his hand shifted from her cheek to some loose strands of hair. Carefully, delicately, he tucked them behind her ear. “Only for a minute.”

Nessa shook her head. “Longest damn minute of my life.”

Karl grinned even as he felt himself shuddering in delight.”
― Minerva Hart, The Deadlands

“Fifth Avenue makes a beautiful corpse.”
― George R. Stewart, Earth Abides

“In truth, Qasim was angry at his own people for surrendering so readily to their fate, and he hated them more than he hated the Sayyadin, even with all their tyranny. The people thought of nothing except satisfying their lusts, and they busied themselves with the search for food and drink, never once thinking about their lot in life and changing this terrible world they endured. That’s what made him so angry. Sometimes, he’d ask himself: What drove them to stay alive, breeding and swarming like swamp flies? What strange force made them continue this accursed existence? He never found an answer, but he went on asking as he fumed on the inside, every once in a while letting out angry gusts from his chest.”
― Ahmed Salah Al-Mahdi, ملاذ : مدينة البعث

“The fables spoke of a great war between the world’s children: conflicts over energy resources that led people to use their most advanced—and most deadly—weapons, until country after country collapsed and millions upon millions perished, leaving only a few struggling to survive in this harsh new environment. Malaz was the first city established in Egypt after civilization collapsed in the wake of the Great War. Its residents named it Malaz, or “Haven,” believing it to be the last refuge of humanity. Meanwhile, the ever-hopeful called it Madinat Al-Baath, or “City of Resurrection.”
― Ahmed Salah Al-Mahdi, ملاذ : مدينة البعث

“The clerics of Abydos say those machines were responsible for the apocalypse that befell mankind,” Sia said. “It was those machines that drove man against man. And so any trace of one of these accursed machines is strictly forbidden. That’s why all of these relics, every last one, were gathered up in a huge temple called the Graveyard of the Past. They’re guarded by the clerics and servants of the temple so that no man can ever get too close. They say that whoever does will be punished by the gods.”
― Ahmed Salah Al-Mahdi, ملاذ : مدينة البعث