Molly Blue

“I look down at myself, but I don't need to. I can feel it. My hot blood is pounding through my body, flooding capillaries and lighting up cells like Fourth of July fireworks. I can feel the elation of every atom in my flesh, brimming with gratitude for the second chance they never expected to get. The chance to start over, to live right, to love right, to burn up in a fiery cloud and never again be buried in the mud. I kiss Julie to hide the fact that I'm blushing. My face is bright red and hot enough to melt steel.

Okay, corpse, a voice in my head says, and I feel a twitch in my belly, more like a gentle nudge than a kick. I'm going now. I'm sorry I couldn't be here for your battle; I was fighting my own. But we won, right? I can feel it. There's a shiver in our legs, a tremor like the Earth speeding up, spinning off into uncharted orbits. Scary, isn't it? But what wonderful thing didn't start out scary? I don't know what the next page is for you, but whatever it is for me I swear I'm not going to fuck it up. I'm not going to yawn off in the middle of a sentence and hide it in a drawer. Not this time. Peel off these dusty wool blankets of apathy and antipathy and cynical desiccation. I want life in all its stupid sticky rawness.

Okay.

Okay, R.

Here it comes.”
― Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies

“Everything dies eventually. We all know that. People, cities, whole civilizations. Nothing lasts. So if existence was just binary, dead or alive, here or not here, what would be the fucking point in anything?"
She looks up at some falling leaves and puts out her hand to catch one, a flaming red maple. "My mom used to say that's why we have memory. And the opposite of memory - hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can build off our pasts and make futures." She twirls the leaf in front of her face, back and forth. "Mom said life only makes any sense if we can see time how God does. Past, present and future all at once."

I allow myself to look at Julie. She sees my tears and tries to wipe one away. "So what's the future?" I ask, not flinching as her fingers brush my eye. "I can see the past and the present, but what's the future?"

"Well . . . ," she says with a broken laugh. "I guess that's the tricky part. The past is made out of facts . . . I guess the future is just hope."

"Or fear."

"No." She shakes her head firmly and sticks the leaf in my hair. "Hope.”
― Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies

“He held on to me so tightly it was as if he was trying to stop my heart from breaking by holding it together.”
― Jane Casey, Let the Dead Speak

“Either women are our equals and don’t need special treatment, or they are fragile and require opportunities to be created for them, and quotas, and so forth. Feminists seem to be promoting a most confused and illogical ideology that is much more about making trouble than anything else. And of course, they aren’t good company, these people.”
― Jane Casey, The Cutting Place