Top 90 Josh Malerman Quotes (2025 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. “You’re going to have to open your eyes.”

— Josh Malerman

4. “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

5. “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

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

— Josh Malerman

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

— Josh Malerman

8. “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

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

— Josh Malerman

10. “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

11. “Don’t dream of anything too horrible,” she says. “And if you do, just add a naked woman on roller skates. That always puts an end to a bad dream.”

— Josh Malerman

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

— Josh Malerman

13. “Man is the creature he fears.”

— Josh Malerman

14. “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

15. “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

16. “A horror she’s long expected has arrived.”

— Josh Malerman

17. “The teens know the rules, but of course that doesn’t mean the teens follow them.”

— Josh Malerman

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

— Josh Malerman

19. “And may you, reader, never keep quiet about the things that need talking about. It’s the only way to solve them.”

— Josh Malerman

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

— Josh Malerman

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

— Josh Malerman

22. “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

23. “Maybe a thing has to be smart enough to lose its mind.”

— Josh Malerman

24. “She breathes deep and looks at Rick for the first time with hope... It’s as if this is the first time the question has ever mattered to Malorie. Suddenly there is room in her life for such luxuries as names.”

— Josh Malerman

25. “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

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

— Josh Malerman

27. “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

28. “But here, she knows, they are not quite as lost. Or alone.”

— Josh Malerman

29. “How can any man know how serious he is about something he says he’s going to do until he does it?”

— Josh Malerman

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

— Josh Malerman

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

— Josh Malerman

32. “Can a man set right his past? With these questions came the possible futility of the ride and the hopelessness of absolution. The guilt was unbearable.”

— Josh Malerman

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

— Josh Malerman

34. “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

35. “Q: What’s with the sinister, hooded, black-robed figures? A: Every too often a stereotype of evil falls into perfect alignment with its reality. Sorry.”

— Josh Malerman

36. “If there’s one thing that stands out above all others in my research, it’s that history doesn’t sit still. Doesn’t sit silent. It makes noise.”

— Josh Malerman

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

— Josh Malerman

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

— Josh Malerman

39. “How can there be nothing?” he said, shaking his head. “Nothing doesn’t make noise! Nothing doesn’t wake you up! You know what does that?” he looked down the length of his booby-trapped rooms. “Something!”

— Josh Malerman

40. “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

41. “We’ve lost mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers,” Rodney Barrett is saying. “We’ve lost wives and husbands, lovers and friends. But nothing stings as much as the children you’ve taken from us. How dare you ask a child to look at you?”

— Josh Malerman

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

— Josh Malerman

43. “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

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

— Josh Malerman

45. “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

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

— Josh Malerman

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

— Josh Malerman

48. “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

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

— Josh Malerman

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

— Josh Malerman