Top 100 Josh Malerman Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Creatures... infinity... our minds have ceilings, Malorie... these things... they are beyond it... higher than it... out of reach... out of –.”

— Josh Malerman

52. “But if you tell someone no enough times, they start thinking yes, just to hear something else, just to hear a different word, they start thinking yes.”

— Josh Malerman

53. “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

54. “Your worries only keep you safe long enough to worry some more.”

— Josh Malerman

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

— Josh Malerman

56. “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

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

— Josh Malerman

58. “Looking into her dull, brown eyes, David wondered if that was to be her lot in life – absorbing the emotions and passions of others, like human tofu.”

— Josh Malerman

59. “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

60. “But legends had a way of making a man bigger than he really was.”

— Josh Malerman

61. “Your baby is smarter than you think.”

— Josh Malerman

62. “Other feelings, outside forces, fears. These were the enemies of a good thing. These were the problems people faced.”

— Josh Malerman

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

— Josh Malerman

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

— Josh Malerman

65. “Drunk or not, I saw the face of Guilt out there! And I saw the rage it takes to atone for it!”

— Josh Malerman

66. “Because no matter what’s going on in your head, your heart, your life, it’s always wise to remember to eat.”

— Josh Malerman

67. “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

68. “I won’t make a statue of what they told me. I don’t want it in my house.”

— Josh Malerman

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

— Josh Malerman

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

— Josh Malerman

71. “Most myths have one foot in a reality so distressing mythic decorations are necessary to hide a greater horror, even as they keep the story alive.”

— Josh Malerman

72. “The children have never seen the world outside their home. Not even through the windows. And Malorie hasn’t looked in more than four years. Four years.”

— Josh Malerman

73. “Knowing that sometimes the pride one takes in one’s work is better for the job than any pace or progress can ever be.”

— Josh Malerman

74. “You’ll learn soon enough in life that everybody’s nervous about something and it’s the ones who do the things they need to do anyway who end up getting the most out of it.”

— Josh Malerman

75. “And just like when the others ask the rim questions, coincidences start to look like prophecies made true. People can find links wherever they want to. It literally happens all day every day.”

— Josh Malerman

76. “So the goal, I think, is to stay kind for as long as you can, no matter what happens to you. No matter what you go through, no matter how many breaks you get and how many you don’t.”

— Josh Malerman

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

— Josh Malerman

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

— Josh Malerman

79. “I was waiting for a literal message, I think. Waiting for a knock at the door, someone to come tell us it was over. It’s the ultimate fantasy for those of us from the old world, isn’t it? Word that the whole nightmare has come to an end?”

— Josh Malerman

80. “That’s real cruelty. That’s world cruelty. Where it’s not just the idea that one person is cruel, it’s that they believe, and have reason to believe, the whole world feels the same.”

— Josh Malerman

81. “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

82. “America doesn’t need you, son. America needs a psychiatrist.”

— Josh Malerman

83. “Farraline’s face was wrapped around a lantern set on a tree stump.”

— Josh Malerman

84. “Curiosity killed the cat and the snooping seventeen-year-old girl.”

— Josh Malerman

85. “So the goal, I think, is to stay kind for as long as you can, no matter what happens to you. No matter what you go through, no matter how many breaks you get and how many you don’t. And I think you always have to remember that if someone is mean to you, they are like that with everybody else too. You see, Bela? Meanness doesn’t have to spread. It can stop with the mean person, stop at the threshold of the kind person.”

— Josh Malerman

86. “You can’t consider yourself remarkable, Richard thought, without being disappointed by the people around you.”

— Josh Malerman

87. “The older I get, the more I think the barometer for intelligence is how kind you are. Because it’s not an easy thing to do, staying mindful, after all you go through in life.”

— Josh Malerman

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

— Josh Malerman

89. “Tom the man died that day. The namesake of her son.”

— Josh Malerman

90. “But that doesn’t change the fact that the house, like the heart, has corners and closets and places for things to hide. That’s really what I wanted to say to you right now. That you may not even know that something’s hiding in your house or heart unless someone like me, a friend in your life, told you that such things can be.”

— Josh Malerman

91. “Despite the behavior by some that she considered unfathomably dangerous only fourteen days ago, she also gets it. People in the new world fall into two categories: safe and unsafe. But who’s to say which lives the better, fuller life?”

— Josh Malerman

92. “Hey, you, reading this rock, YOU, standing at the Spirit of Samhattan, where do you find your identity if not in what you love?”

— Josh Malerman

93. “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

94. “If there’s one thing I could convey to you, one thing that would take root in you just like the need to eat and sleep, it would be this: try to stay kind as long as you can.”

— Josh Malerman

95. “Malorie is able to smile, and sometimes even laugh, despite the unfathomable horrors that have become commonplace.”

— Josh Malerman

96. “If they don’t know what they do, they can’t be “villains.”

— Josh Malerman

97. “Was this grief’s only gift? The eradication of the highs, by way of leveling the lows?”

— Josh Malerman

98. “Death is never a nice thing. Even for those old enough to deserve it.”

— Josh Malerman

99. “There was a truth she was trying to deny, listening again for that pleading: no matter how much a family has grieved, if their missing loved one had not been found, alive or dead, there was always hope.”

— Josh Malerman

100. “There’s no need to live like this, miss. Consider these children. Would you rob them the chance to view a brisk, beautiful day like this?”

— Josh Malerman