Top 80 Jonathan Maberry Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You have to keep your mind as wide-open as your eyes, because almost nothing is what it seems.”

— Jonathan Maberry

2. “Sometimes people say terrible things when they’re scared. They don’t mean to, but they can’t help it. They lash out because if they can see that their words hurt someone else, it makes them feel as if they aren’t completely powerless.”

— Jonathan Maberry

3. “Man can live about forty days without food, about three days without water, about eight minutes without air, but only for one second without hope.”

— Jonathan Maberry

4. “Humanity comes first. Always. Politics and religion, valuable as they are, are always of second importance. If we do not work together to preserve life, to treasure it and keep it safe, then nothing we fight for is worth having.”

— Jonathan Maberry

5. “Generosity could be as contagious as the zombie plague as long as enough people were willing to be carriers.”

— Jonathan Maberry

6. “Value is relative,” said the saint. “A man with his house on fire and a man dying of thirst each place a different value on a glass of water.”

— Jonathan Maberry

7. “There are moments that define a person’s whole life. Moments in which everything they are and everything they may possibly become balance on a single decision. Life and death, hope and despair, victory and failure teeter precariously on the decision made at that moment. These are moments ungoverned by happenstance, untroubled by luck. These are the moments in which a person earns the right to live, or not.”

— Jonathan Maberry

8. “Revenge is an infection of the spirit.”

— Jonathan Maberry

9. “A wise man once said that we can’t make anyone feel or do anything. We can throw things into the wind, but it’s up to each person to decide how they want to react, where they want to stand when things fall.”

— Jonathan Maberry

10. “Closure isn’t closure until someone’s ready to close the door.”

— Jonathan Maberry

11. “But sometimes shame is a more powerful engine than rage. Like rage, it burns hot; and like rage it tends to consume its own furnace.”

— Jonathan Maberry

12. “My whole body is a lethal weapon, you know. I know more ways to kill you than you know how to die.”

— Jonathan Maberry

13. “The truth is the truth. What changes is what we know about it and what we’re willing to believe.”

— Jonathan Maberry

14. “There are moments that define a person’s whole life. MOMENTS in which everything they are and everything they may possibly become hinge on a single decision.”

— Jonathan Maberry

15. “Point is, people lie a lot. Sometimes out of habit. Not many people are good at telling the truth.”

— Jonathan Maberry

16. “A sword by itself is not evil. A sword can be used to slay an enemy, or release a suffering friend into the darkness. A sword can cut ropes that bind the helpless. A raised sword can be a threat or it can be a symbol of leadership... A weapon, my children, is good or evil depending on the intention of whoever holds it.”

— Jonathan Maberry

17. “It’s easier to be a character in a story than the star of your own tragedy.”

— Jonathan Maberry

18. “When you have to kill the same terrorist twice in one week, then there’s either something wrong with your skills or something wrong with your world. And there’s nothing wrong with my skills.”

— Jonathan Maberry

19. “We had the whole ‘when you assume you make an ass out of you and me’ speech in school.”

— Jonathan Maberry

20. “Often it was the most unlikely people who found within themselves a spark of something greater. It was probably always there, but most people are never tested, and they go through their whole lives without ever knowing that when things are at their worst, they are at their best.”

— Jonathan Maberry

21. “There is music in the noise, beauty in the chaos, truth in the lies, light in the void. He who has eyes, let him see.”

— Jonathan Maberry

22. “I’m not sure I could trust a man who would bypass an Oreo in favor of vanilla wafers. It’s a fundamental character flaw, possibly a sign of true evil.”

— Jonathan Maberry

23. “There was a sliver of moon and a splash of stars, and the light outlined her face and glistened on the tears that ran like mercury down her cheeks.”

— Jonathan Maberry

24. “I’ve managed to stay alive out here in the Ruin because I’m a realist. I allow the truth to be the truth, no matter how much I might want it to be something else.”

— Jonathan Maberry

25. “When Chong made to sit down next to her, Lilah drew her knife and stabbed the point into the earth between them. “I can see that you need some quiet time,” he said and scuttled quickly away.”

— Jonathan Maberry

26. “Guilt and rage, hatred and fear were pathways to weakness and clumsy choices.”

— Jonathan Maberry

27. “It’s just that I’m fifteen, and I have this crazy idea I might actually have a life in front of me. I don’t see how it’s going to do me much good to believe that the world is over and this is just an epilogue.”

— Jonathan Maberry

28. “Nerves were on hair triggers, and if my virgin aunt had stepped out from behind those crates with a puppy in one hand and a baby in the other my guys would have capped her.”

— Jonathan Maberry

29. “We’re each alone inside our heads, some more so than others.”

— Jonathan Maberry

30. “Rage was sometimes a useful ally in the heat of a fight, but it was a trickster. It made everything seem possible.”

— Jonathan Maberry

31. “They held each other and wept as the night closed its fist around their tiny shelter, and the world below them seethed with killers both living and dead.”

— Jonathan Maberry

32. “Spotting the same car three times could have been a coincidence. Kim Kardashian’s boobs could be real, too, and that’s about as likely.”

— Jonathan Maberry

33. “I took a very careful hold of the metal door handle. No shocks and nothing exploded. I pulled gently and the door yielded, but I stayed on the balls of my feet. If I felt the tension of a wire or heard a click, I was going to set a new land speed record for a scared white guy in a hazmat suit.”

— Jonathan Maberry

34. “It’s refreshing to be insane. Just as it’s liberating to be aware of it.”

— Jonathan Maberry

35. “That’s when I got the first real tingle of warning. Small, but serious. The smart thing to do would have been to simply end the call. No goodbyes, no polite refusals, just hit the button, put the cell phone in the bottom drawer of my file cabinet, and go to the multiplex to watch a movie about things blowing up. Maybe get some Ben and Jerry’s afterward.”

— Jonathan Maberry

36. “I’m self-aware enough to know that I have a somewhat fractured personality. Not exactly multiple personality disorder, but clearly there were different drivers at the wheel depending on my mood, and depending on my needs. Over.”

— Jonathan Maberry

37. “We forget that winter will come again. We forget that nothing really endures and that, like the flowers that die at the end of the growing season, we’ll join them in the cold ground.”

— Jonathan Maberry

38. “There are different kinds of predators. There are the kinds who target the weak. And there are those with more of a Dexter vibe who don’t lose sleep if a child abuser has a hard time on the way to the station.”

— Jonathan Maberry

39. “She had a pretty name but she knew she wasn’t pretty.”

— Jonathan Maberry

40. “Know your enemy. The more you know about them, the less easily they can surprise you. And by studying them you might identify a weakness or vulnerability.”

— Jonathan Maberry

41. “Suffering is easier to endure when shared.”

— Jonathan Maberry

42. “Dude, what is it with you and zoms?”

— Jonathan Maberry

43. “It’s important to know the past, but your survival depends on knowing the present.”

— Jonathan Maberry

44. “She agreed with Mark Twain that golf was a “good walk spoiled.”

— Jonathan Maberry

45. “Every single zom, every man, woman and child, no matter how decayed or how frightening they are, no matter how dangerous they are – they were all once real people. They had names, and lives, and personalities, and families. They had dreams and goals. They had pasts and they thought they had futures, but something came and took that away from them.”

— Jonathan Maberry

46. “There are such moments in a life. Solitary seconds on which the reality of what life means pivots and turns from a dead end toward a road of untrodden grass that stretches on forever.”

— Jonathan Maberry

47. “Sometimes shame is a more powerful engine than rage.”

— Jonathan Maberry

48. “Shooting a pistol while running with any accuracy at all is next to impossible. They train us at the Academy to do it at a walk. Slow yourself down, focus on the target. Be relentless, but be accurate. Nobody ever won a gunfight by missing what they were aiming at.”

— Jonathan Maberry

49. “And that made him wonder if a person who is forced into bad situations over and over again when they’re too weak or helpless to do anything about it will eventually make bad choices of their own simply because they’ve become habituated to them.”

— Jonathan Maberry

50. “He could laugh, though, and there was no bluesman who ever lived who didn’t know how to laugh at the craziness of life.”

— Jonathan Maberry