Undead Quotes

“Sometimes dead is better”
― Stephen King, Pet Sematary

“What's that you're holding?" he asked, noticing the pamphlet, still rolled up in her left hand.

"Oh, this?" She held it up. "How to Come Out to Your Parents."

He widened his eyes. "Something you want to tell me?"

"It's not for me. It's for you." She handed it to him.

"I don't have to come out to my mother," said Simon. "She already thinks I'm gay because I'm not interested in sports and I haven't had a serious girlfriend yet. Not that she knows of, anyway."

"But you have to come out as a vampire," Clary pointed out. "Luke thought you could, you know, use one of the suggested speeches in the pamphlet, except use the word 'undead' instead of--"

"I get it, I get it." Simon spread the pamplet open. "Here, I'll practice on you." He cleared his throat. "Mom. I have something to tell you. I'm undead. Now, I know you may have some preconceived notions about the undead. I know you may not be comfortable with the idea of me being undead. But I'm here to tell you that the undead are just like you and me." Simon paused. "Well, okay. Possibly more like me than you."

"SIMON."

"All right, all right." He went on. "The first thing you need to understand is that I'm the same person I always was. Being undead isn't the most important thing about me. It's just part of who I am. The second thing you should know is that it isn't a choice. I was born this way." Simon squinted at her over the pamphlet. "Sorry, reborn this way.”
― Cassandra Clare

“Something coming back from the dead was almost always bad news. Movies taught me that. For every one Jesus you get a million zombies.”
― David Wong, John Dies at the End

“The dead don’t walk. Except, sometimes, when they do.”
― T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead

“Which was how Britteny ended up nestled next to Mickey, under the shelter of a painter's drop cloth.
She felt no pain.
She saw no light.
She heard, but barely.
Her heart was still and silent.
Yet she did not die.”
― Michael Grant, Hunger

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

“If people don't wish to be eaten then they shouldn't taste so nice”
― Amy Mah-Vampire, Fangs Rule: A Girls Guide to Being a Vampire

“She was half a wild creature that loved a graveyard, the first taste of misty night air, and the heft of a shovel. She knew how things died. And in her darkest moments, she feared she did not know how to live.”
― Emily Lloyd-Jones, The Bone Houses

“Biers was where the undead drank. And when Igor the barman was asked for a Bloody Mary, he didn't mix a metaphor.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“He is the intermediary between us, his audience, the living, and they, the dolls, the undead, who cannot live at all and yet who mimic the living in every detail since, though they cannot speak or weep, still they project those signals of signification we instantly recognize as language.”
― Angela Carter, Wayward Girls and Wicked Women

“It had occurred to him that if the undead don't realize that they are dead, he might easily be one of them himself.”
― Dan Chaon, Stay Awake

“What is it like.... what is it like to be dead?' Evan looked at him with his dull, unblinking blue eyes, ' I don't know, what is it like...... to be alive?”
― Daniel Waters

“A dozen cobras moved as one, shattering their bottles. Wine and glass sprayed the room. The snakes sprang for Isyllt's attacker with fangs unfolded. He screamed high and sharp as they uncoiled, long slick bodies whipping through the air. She wasn't sure if their venom could survive death and pickling, but it didn't seem to matter. After several bites, he curled on the floor, weeping and trying to bat the undead snakes away.”
― Amanda Downum, Kingdoms of Dust

“My mother taught me to never make deals with demons”
“Your mother sounds very uncreative...”
― Nicholas Woode-Smith

“Here the destruction is subtle, and there the body is torn. Here the breaking is perceived, and there the dead unaware carry their putrid remains. All trade in filth, carry their filth one to another, all walk the streets as though the ground did not recoil, all stretch their necks to bite the air, as though the breath had not withdrawn. The seed bursts without a blessing, and the harvest is gathered as if it were food.”
― Leonard Cohen, Book of Mercy

“I saw thousands of them. A sea of the dead that roared like an ocean! You would have heard them screaming toward you. It would have taken days to steer them away. Killing them? I don't think killing them would have been possible.”
― Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead, Vol. 27: The Whisperer War

“Horrific many eyed, many winged angels, undead zombies and vampires are part of our cultures. Witches, warlocks, and demons as well. [...] In many cases what has given birth to some of them may never be known, but perhaps it is because we are not looking in the right places.”
― L.B. Ó Ceallaigh, Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives

“It suddenly occurred to me just how absurd this scene was: a guy wearing a suit of armor, standing next to an undead king, both hunched over the controls of a classic arcade game. It was the sort of surreal image you'd expect to see on the cover of an old issue of Heavy Metal or Dragon magazine.”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

“We create ourselves to be almost blind walking dead, where we are led by both negative aspects of religion and cultural conformity to gloss over people. We gloss over the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire. We gloss over the Japanese internment camps that most likely would have been far worse had the war continued longer. We often marginalize those besides the ethnic and Jewish descent that died in the Nazi holocaust of World war II.”
― L.B. Ó Ceallaigh, Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives

“The Blood Supper by Stewart Stafford

Nightcrawler leaves their dirt bed,
Seeking an essential blood supper,
Cloaked in regal Stygian armour,
Bar one chink in the left chest area.

All the experience of centuries used,
Lives lived long before their victims,
Stalking stacked in a predator's favour,
Shock overwhelms when blindsided.

The infected victim then becomes one,
With their undead attacker, connected,
Sharing their contagion and obsessions,
In a parasitic void betwixt life and death.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“The revolution loves and creates life; and in order to create life it may be obliged to prevent some men from circumscribing life. In addition to the life-death cycle basic to nature, there is almost an unnatural living death: life which is denied its fullness.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“Meanwhile, the reanimated zombies followed along at a much slower pace lurking in the shadows and finishing off anyone that managed to slip by, until the entire city had finally fallen and become a metropolis of the undead.”
― Jason Medina, The Manhattanville Incident: An Undead Novel

“The vampire burned up?” Dylan asked, his eyes lit with humor. “You mean, he doesn’t sparkle in the sunlight?”
― Colleen Gleason, The Spiritglass Charade

“The earliest documented appearance of rabies on our planet has been in Mesopotamia around 2000 B.C. ... The symptoms of rabies were diagnosed throughout history, following its inception, as being a form of undead or cursed type of creature, revenants if you will.”
― L.B. Ó Ceallaigh, Revenants, Retroviruses, and Religion: How Viruses and Disease Created Cultural Mythology and Shaped Religious Perspectives

“FIGHT THE BITE refers to this phenomenon as 'spite bites': namely, when people who are nonfatally contaminated (e.g., by a scratch, or a bite on the ankle: any matter of infection that─instead of killing them instantly─leaves them with a week of fever and dread before they become undead) decide to spend their last days alive contaminating as many other victims as they can.”
― Bennett Sims, A Questionable Shape

“The Haunting ensures the current state of Dy5topia―a nightmarish world where terrified 'Creeple' nervously travel through an ever-changing, phantasmagorical land filled with Mutants, Robots, unDead, Specters, Beasts, Landscape-lifeforms, and Others. With these things in mind, consider yourself cordially invited to enter the regions of Chet Zar’s Dark Universe!”
― Mike Correll, DY5TOPIA: A Field Guide to the Dark Universe of Chet Zar

“All practitioners of Wamphyrism must in the end become possessed by the undead and these unclean spirits so possessing, these dark forces, are also linked to the Satanic bloodline. Look to Mastema, “the angel of disaster, the father of all evil”. Look to deep antiquity and beyond and there you will find the nature both of Satan and Wamphyrism which humans in their false leads, confusion and nescience will seek to obscure. Every excess, every blasphemy, every zenith of the hideous and catastrophic which those who preach a watered down doctrine, claiming that such is either a distortion, a subversion or modern innovation, already exists in the ancient world. “Great is the daughter of Heaven who tortures babies. Her hand is a net, her embrace is death. She is cruel, raging, angry, predatory.” Do not let the shackles of those preaching false doctrine hold you back. Instead break those fetters and, looking to ancient evil as the source of your praxis, unleash hell.”
― Agony's Point Press

“Jeez, looked like no group could totally get along no matter what side of the dirt they were on.”
― Jeaniene Frost, One Grave at a Time

“I swear to the gods if they kill me I'm going to figure out a way to haunt you, again." Baxter disappeared, phasing through the wall and into the boss room.”
― Scott Killian, Lich Core

“There was a faint scratching. Eyes searched for the source behind dusty glasses. Nothing–
just darkness. He glanced at the body, and froze. It was still staring at him… but he’d moved. He took a step. Scratching. It was hair grating on the wood–a lifeless head turning on a lifeless neck.”
― Tony Del Degan, In River Cardinal