Top 90 Josh Malerman Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “It’s better to face madness with a plan than to sit still and let it take you in pieces.”

— Josh Malerman

2. “You can smell it, too. Death. Dying. Decay. The sky is falling, the sky is dying, the sky is dead.”

— Josh Malerman

3. “The moment between deciding to open your eyes and then actually doing it is as scary a thing as there is in the new world.”

— Josh Malerman

4. “Only a box of birds, Malorie thinks. Yet, it does feel like progress.”

— Josh Malerman

5. “There’s a difference between bad and evil. Bad is when you ignore the one you love. But evil is when you know exactly what that person wants, what means most to them, and you figure out how to take it away.”

— Josh Malerman

6. “We left because some people choose to wait for news and others make their own.”

— Josh Malerman

7. “Man is the creature he fears.”

— Josh Malerman

8. “Your baby is smarter than you think. At first, Malorie struggled to accept this. In the new world, babies had to be trained to wake up with their eyes closed. They had to be raised scared. There wasn’t room for unknowns. Yet, there were times when the Boy and the Girl surprised her.”

— Josh Malerman

9. “Creatures... infinity... our minds have ceilings, Malorie... these things... they are beyond it... higher than it... out of reach... out of –.”

— Josh Malerman

10. “If you accept the falling as normal, it can become its own solid ground.”

— Josh Malerman

11. “We’re pretty sure the people who run the cell towers have stopped going to work. Or they’re dead.”

— Josh Malerman

12. “Wires run from under the back door into the first-floor bedrooms, where amplifiers alert Malorie and the children to any sounds coming from outside the house. The three of them live this way. They do not go outside for long periods of time.”

— Josh Malerman

13. “In a world where you can’t open your eyes, isn’t a blindfold all you could ever hope for?”

— Josh Malerman

14. “A grisly story, but one whose notoriety Malorie attributes to the seemingly senseless way the Internet has of making random occurrences famous.”

— Josh Malerman

15. “It all kind of happened in a row, each step allowed the next step to happen. All because we weren’t stagnant.”

— Josh Malerman

16. “And what scares you more? The creatures or yourself, as the memories of a million sights and colors come flooding towards you?”

— Josh Malerman

17. “One day, the pain your mother and the pain every mother speaks of will come to you in the same form: childbirth. Only a women can experience it and because of this all women are bonded.”

— Josh Malerman

18. “You tell yourself you’ve waited four years because you were afraid to lose the house forever. You tell yourself you waited four years because you wanted to train the children first. But neither of these are true. You waited four years because here, on this trip, on this river, where madmen and wolves lurk, where creatures must be near, on THIS DAY you will have to do something you haven’t done outside in even longer than four years. Today you’re going to have to open your eyes. Outside.”

— Josh Malerman

19. “Something unwanted was added to something wanted and blew the whole thing apart.”

— Josh Malerman

20. “But a madman at ease is safer than a sane woman unsettled.”

— Josh Malerman

21. “Sometimes things just got too complicated. Something unwanted was added to something wanted and blew the whole thing apart.”

— Josh Malerman

22. “This,’ Malorie says, placing a bloodied hand on the Girl’s head, ‘this is Olympia.’ The Girl looks at Malorie quickly. She blushes. She smiles. She likes it. ‘And this,’ Malorie says, pressing the Boy to her body, ‘is Tom.’ He grins, shy and happy.”

— Josh Malerman

23. “She’d heard of people, adults usually, intentionally turning a good thing into a bad thing. When things were going good, adults liked to ruin them. Her own mom called it a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy.’ And you did it to prove to yourself that it wasn’t so good to begin with.”

— Josh Malerman

24. “The fear she experiences sits firmly upon the center of her soul.”

— Josh Malerman

25. “And the only thing worse than receiving all your information from one source is believing it entirely.”

— Josh Malerman

26. “The world is confined to the same cardboard box that houses the birds outside.”

— Josh Malerman

27. “It talked about irreconcilable life-forms. Two worlds whose compounds were entirely foreign might cause damage to one another if they were to cross paths.”

— Josh Malerman

28. “It’s the spaces between words, the downbeats in a conversation in which two people feel bad for having fought.”

— Josh Malerman

29. “You are saving their lives for a life not living.”

— Josh Malerman

30. “The monster, Carol thought, looks different when nobody’s watching.”

— Josh Malerman

31. “I’m the only one here with the nerve to look outside. Your worries only keep you safe long enough to worry some more.”

— Josh Malerman

32. “Forcing this philosophy deeper into his mind, searching for the soil of its roots, he allows himself to breathe, slowly.”

— Josh Malerman

33. “Boots, bushes, gardens, storefronts, buildings, streets, and stars. Why, she would have had to re-create the globe for them. But the best they got was fish. And the Boy loved them.”

— Josh Malerman

34. “The creatures of her mind walk horizonless, open fields. They stand outside the windows of former homes and gaze curiously at the glass. They study. They examine. They observe. They do the one thing Malorie isn’t allowed to do. They look.”

— Josh Malerman

35. “But he didn’t care if he understood it or not. The words just felt good. Felt really good. Like every time he picked it up he slipped into a warm pool, bathwater, and the world hugged him, telling him things were crazy, yes, but we love you, kid, the world actually does love you.”

— Josh Malerman

36. “How can she expect her children to dream as big as the stars if they can’t lift their heads to gaze upon them?”

— Josh Malerman

37. “I don’t think it’s a matter of one man being better prepared than another,’ Gary is saying. ‘I think of it more like a 3-D movie. At first, the audience thinks the objects are really coming at them. They hold their hands up for protection. But the intelligent ones, the ones who are very aware, know they were safe all along.”

— Josh Malerman

38. “Creatures, Malorie thinks. What a cheap word.”

— Josh Malerman

39. “There are five thousand species of insect and animal who are hidden, watching us, listening to us right now. And we figured out how to blend in with the trees. Is that our big achievement, Private Tonka? We’re finally as smart as the bugs?”

— Josh Malerman

40. “They told me that freedom is doing something you would never ordinarily do. Freedom is leaving the person you’re used to being behind. Real freedom is doing something so dreadful that you have no choice but to turn your back on yourself. Do you understand?”

— Josh Malerman

41. “Robin was a great kid. Smarter than her father at eight years old. She liked the oddest things. Like the instructions for a toy more than the toy itself. The credits of a movie instead of the movie. The way something was written. An expression on my face. Once she told me I looked like the sun to her, because of my hair. I asked her if I shined like the sun, and she told me, ‘No, Daddy, you shine more like the moon, when it’s dark outside.”

— Josh Malerman

42. “It feels like a cage was lowered over them all. A cardboard box. A bird box. Blocking out the sun forever.”

— Josh Malerman

43. “Make sure they understand the things we’re told not to talk about are the things that get real bad. Those subjects get sick. And they get confused. And nobody can make sense of them because they were never allowed to talk them out.”

— Josh Malerman

44. “Is he friendly?” Tom says quietly. “I’ve discovered,” Jules says, “that a dog will become fast friends with the people who feed him.”

— Josh Malerman

45. “Guilt cannot be overcome, only endured.”

— Josh Malerman

46. “For the first time in either of their lives, they were falling in love.”

— Josh Malerman

47. “And the androgynous laughter continued, too. Thick globules of sexless cheer.”

— Josh Malerman

48. “She was smiling. It was a smile Steve knew very well. The kind of smile from a girl that implied, if you answered in the affirmative, she’d see you in a way you always wish you saw yourself.”

— Josh Malerman

49. “The whole world, it seems, is crazy. And everybody within it is only a gradation.”

— Josh Malerman

50. “As long as nobody knew what it was, nobody could take it from her.”

— Josh Malerman