The collection / 75 fragments

The living archive

Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

SearchTypeTopicEraCulture / collection labelCountry attributionTraditionOrder

Author

Leave empty for every voice. Browse all authors ↗

Reset

Culture labels and country attributions follow the source collections; earliest origins may be unknown.

75 results · Page 1 of 4Play this collection ▷

01c. 1981 AD

There's no benchmark for how life's "supposed" to happen. There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, it's up to you how you respond to it.

Isaac Marion / quote

↗

02c. 1981 AD

I am Dead, but it's not so bad. I've learned to live with it.

Isaac Marion / quote

↗

03c. 1981 AD

The past is made out of facts... I guess the future is just hope.

Isaac Marion / quote

↗

04c. 1981 AD

...and we'll see what happens when we say Yes while this rigor mortis world screams No.

Isaac Marion / quote

↗

05c. 1981 AD

Your dreamers. You ridiculous children. You dancing grinning fuckups. Here is your bright future. Your earnest, saccharine hope. How does it taste dripping from the neck of everyone you love?

Isaac Marion / quote

↗

06c. 1981 AD

Every time I go to sleep, I know I may never wake up. How could anyone expect to? You drop your tiny, helpless mind into a bottomless well, crossing your fingers and hoping when you pull it out on its flimsy fishing wire it hasn't been gnawed to bones by nameless beasts below.

Isaac Marion / quote

↗

07c. 1981 AD

My friend "M" says the irony of being a zombie is that everything is funny, but you can't smile, because your lips have rotted off.

Isaac Marion / quote

↗

08c. 1981 AD

Why is it beautiful that humanity keeps coming back? So does herpes.

Isaac Marion / quote

↗

09c. 1981 AD

The darkness of the room is pulsing with gunfire, and by our standards we are grossly outnumbered - there are only three of us to every one of them - but something is tipping things in our favor. Our manic speed is uncharacteristic of the Dead, and our prey are not prepared for it. Is this all coming from me? Creatures without desire usually don't move quickly, but they're following my lead, and I am an angry whirlwind.

Isaac Marion / quote

↗

10c. 1981 AD

What's wrong with people?" she says, almost too quiet for me to hear. "Were they born with parts missing or did it fall out somewhere along the way?

Isaac Marion / quote

↗

11c. 1981 AD

Good people see past their own fucking lives.

Isaac Marion / quote

↗

12c. 1981 AD

Mozart,” Julie says in a bitter chuckle, staring at the speaker. “It’s supposed to be the pinnacle of art, right? This transcendent human achievement? And we use it for background noise in bathrooms. We literally shit on it.

Isaac Marion / quote

↗

13c. 1981 AD

It frustrates and fascinates me that we'll never know for sure, that despite the best efforts of historians and scientists and poets, there are some things we'll just never know. What the first song sounded like. How it felt to see the first photograph. Who kissed the first kiss, and if it was any good.

Isaac Marion / quote

↗

14c. 1981 AD

The magic that confounds them is humanity. The naturally occurring, slow acting, unpredictably potent product of conscious minds connecting. These madmen want to synthesise love. They want to manufacture it, weaponise it, and use it to control people. It’s such a ludicrous scheme it would be funny if they weren’t trampling the world in pursuit of it.

Isaac Marion / quote

↗

15c. 1981 AD

This plague... This curse... I have an idea where it came from. I don't think it's from any spell or virus or nuclear rays. I think it's from a deeper place. I think we brought it here. I think we crushed ourselves down over the centuries. Buried ourselves under greed and hate and whatever other sins we could find until our souls finally hit the rock bottom of the universe. And then they scraped a hole through it, into some... dark place. We released it. We poked through the seabed and the oil erupted, painted us black, pulled our inner sickness out for everyone to see. Now here we are in this dry corpse of a world, rotting on our feet till there's nothing left but bones and the buzz of flies.

Isaac Marion / quote

↗

16c. 1981 AD

Music? Music is life! It’s physical emotion - you can touch it! It’s neon ecto-energy sucked out of spirits and switched into sound waves for your ears to swallow. Are you telling me, what, that it’s boring? You don’t have time for it?

Isaac Marion / quote

↗

17c. 1981 AD

In the darkest and strangest of places with the most macabre of company, this music moves her and her life pulses hard... And even for Julie's safety, I can't bring myself to smother it.

Isaac Marion / quote

↗

18c. 1981 AD

Every time I go to sleep, I know I may never wake up. How could anyone expect to? You drop your tiny, helpless mind into a bottomless well, crossing your fingers and hoping that when you pull it out on its flimsy fishing wire it hasn't been gnawed to bones by the beasts below. Hoping you pull up anything at all.

Isaac Marion / quote

↗

19c. 1981 AD

I try to think of things to say but nothing comes, and if something did come I probably couldn't say it. This is my great obstacle, the biggest of all the boulders littering my path. In my mind I am eloquent; I can climb intricate scaffolds of words to reach the highest cathedral ceilings and paint my thought. But when I open my mouth, everything collapses.

Isaac Marion / quote

↗

20c. 1981 AD

I don't know what happened. Disease? War? Social collapse? Or was it just us? The Dead replacing the Living? I guess it's not so important. Once you've arrived at the end of the world, it hardly matters which route you took.

Isaac Marion / quote

↗

21c. 1981 AD

What is left of us? … No countries, no cultures, no wars but still no peace. What’s at our core, then? What’s still squirming in our bones when everything else is stripped?

Isaac Marion / quote

↗

22c. 1981 AD

To be or not to be, that is the question: to go on living, fighting against this sea of troubles, or to die and end everything? Why be afraid of death? To die is to sleep, no more. Perhaps to dream? Yes, that's the problem: in that sleep of death, what dreams will come?

Isaac Marion / quote

↗

23c. 1981 AD

You won’t starve, R. In my short life I made so many choices just because I thought they were required, but my dad was right: there’s no rule book for the world. It’s in our heads, our collective human hive-mind. If there are rules, we’re the ones making them. We can change them whenever we want to.

Isaac Marion / quote

↗

24c. 1981 AD

I mean obviously, staying alive is pretty fucking important . . . but there’s got to be something beyond that, right?

Isaac Marion / quote

↗