261 Quotes by Max Brooks

Fear and anxiety. I’ve lived with the latter all my life. Now it’s gone.

Fear is a real, present, right-in-your-face threat. Anxiety comes from a potential – or in this case, future – threat. Fear can be conquered. Anxiety has to be endured.

Panic drowns thought,” I told the zombie, “so it’s time to stop panicking and start figuring out how to survive.

Injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you. That’s why most weapons of war are designed to injure instead of kill. Wounded are more of a drain than the dead.

I think the fascination with zombies is that they don’t obey the rules of monsters. The first rule of monsters is that you have to go find them. You have to make a conscious choice to go to the swamp or the desert or the abandoned summer camp.

Redeker believed that to try to protect everyone would stretch the government’s resources to the breaking point, thus dooming the entire population. He compared it to survivors from a sinking ship capsizing a lifeboat that simply did not have room for them all. Redeker had even gone so far as to calculate who should be “brought aboard.

If your Soviet neighbor is trying to set fire to your house, you can’t be worrying about the Arab down the block. If suddenly it’s the Arab in your backyard, you can’t be worrying about the People’s Republic of China and if one day the ChiComs show up at your front door with an eviction notice in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other, then the last thing you’re going do is look over his shoulder for a walking corpse.

What better place to hide than among that part of society that no one else even wants to acknowledge.

People only see the present through the lenses of their personal pasts.