Sometimes dead is better

It suddenly occurred to me just how absurd this scene was: a guy wearing a suit of armor, standing next to an undead king, both hunched over the controls of a classic arcade game. It was the sort of surreal image you'd expect to see on the cover of an old issue of Heavy Metal or Dragon magazine.

It’s one thing to be an undead fiend of darkness, but it takes an immense amount of work to look cool while doing it.

Fear is the short road to death and this world, Changed by the flux of decay: Survival is the exception for weary men.From the new book The Waning

Kate grasped her small handbag and pulled a small blue vial and threw it into the grinding mass. It shattered harmlessly, causing two creatures to pause with a look of confusion."What is that potion?" Simon asked.Kate stared as the two undead things began to shuffle forward again. She glanced into her purse. "Damn it! That was my perfume.

We are aberrations—beings born undead, neither one thing nor another, or two things at once … uncanny things that have nothing to do with the rest of creation, horrors that poison the world by sowing our madness everywhere we go, glutting daylight and darkness with incorporeal obscenities. From across an immeasurable divide, we brought the supernatural into all that is manifest. Like a faint haze it floats around us. We keep company with ghosts. Their graves are marked in our minds, and they will never be disinterred from the cemeteries of our remembrance. Our heartbeats are numbered, our steps counted. Even as we survive and reproduce, we know ourselves to be dying in a dark corner of infinity. Wherever we go, we know not what expects our arrival but only that it is there.

Flowers are evil, because they live just to die for the love of other people. You don’t believe me? Try it for yourself and see if you’ll be good afterwards. Undeath is a way of life, for some things. That doesn’t make it good or anything. Especially anything. Nothing makes anything anything. Because nothing is a serious matter, and anything just is.

He had existed for a long time and was fluent in many languages - most of them…dead ones.

The undead did not love, but they remembered love with a savage loyalty.

Since when do wizards wear robes?" I whispered. "That's falling into every human stereotype ever created." Jeezum. Next thing you knew, they'd be waving around magic wands."The First Elder thought they'd look more intimidating in robes than in business suits," Alex whispered back. "They look like they're on their way to a costume party at Hogwarts.

Take it from an old cadaver. Let go of the past.

If people don't wish to be eaten then they shouldn't taste so nice

Some necrophobes earn their own fates.

Todd’s wife was one of those women with a forced smile perpetually cemented on her face. Even after being chased by a mob of homicidal maniacs and attempting to barricade doors with barstools she kept up appearances, practicing for the days when her husband would be running for public office. When she saw her son poking at their former mail carrier’s dead body a look of utter horror came across her face for the slightest instant. She caught herself and put that smile back on so quickly Will wondered if she might have pulled a few cheek muscles. “Trevor!” she hissed through clenched teeth. “Trevor, you get away from that this instant! You don’t know what kind of diseases that man had. Children shouldn’t play with dead things.” Will looked at Todd and smirked. “Cute kid. How many of those things do you think are out there?

Come now, I was not about to let that thing eat you.

He is the intermediary between us, his audience, the living, and they, the dolls, the undead, who cannot live at all and yet who mimic the living in every detail since, though they cannot speak or weep, still they project those signals of signification we instantly recognize as language.

Which was how Britteny ended up nestled next to Mickey, under the shelter of a painter's drop cloth.She felt no pain.She saw no light.She heard, but barely.Her heart was still and silent.Yet she did not die.

Don't judge me. Ethics and morality no longer exist in our world. It's a luxury of the past, afforded only to those who had a future.

Happiness is the province of those who ask few questions.

What's that you're holding?" he asked, noticing the pamphlet, still rolled up in her left

The undead don’t care about careers. Vampires are all retirees.

In order to remain undead, I must steal the life force of someone whose fate matters less to me than my own.' I've always supposed that Wall Street traders utter essentially the same sentence.

Sorcha took the elevator down to the basement of the fashion house. She glanced at her stunningly beautiful reflection in the mirror and smiled to herself. How fortunate she was to be a vampire - no gray hairs, no wrinkles, no broken nails, no weight problems, and no PMT. What bliss! And how fortunate it was that all the legends about vampires were not true. She could not imagine an existence where she could not see and admire her own likeness - such a life to her would be intolerable and tedious. How could any female, even a vampire, survive without being able to see their own reflection? How could they do their hair and makeup? The very idea was totally preposterous.

Suspicion infused Alex's voice. "Okay? That's it?"I looked back at him and smiled. "That's it. We disagree. It's done. We'll deal with whatever comes next."He stood up, brows lowered over squinty eyes. "Did Lafitte ply you with brandy, or have the body snatchers been here?

I would say Randolph's a horse's ass, but that would be unfair to the horse.

I believe he's been asked to testify today," I told Lennox, who'd continued to track Truman's progress through the room. "He's a member of the historical undead, Truman Capote, the author. He wrote Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood."..."Hi, Truman, you're sitting next to me," I said, pulling out his chair. I figured after he'd asked me to suck on his cherry, we should be on a first-name basis.

Isabelle! he called again. Let down your raven hair. Oh, my God, Clary muttered. There was something in that blood Raphael gave you, wasn't there? I'm going to kill him. He's already dead, Simon observed. He's undead. Obviously he can still die, you know, again. I'll re-kill him.

Let's say that it belong to me as much as it belongs to anyone alive today. If I am, strictly speaking, living. The old word was undead, you know, but aren't all living things undead. I dislike imprecision.

We’re not a people worth saving, plain and simple. We’re completely beyond that—both the undead and the few still living. Yeah, 'living.' Some life, huh? But it’s the only life we could ever possibly live if we want to stay alive another day. It’s our life that terrifies me.

Are you telling me that vampires and werewolves are the reason America won the Revolutionary War?,” I asked, dumbfounded.

Being kidnapped and abused by the undead was worse than calculus, but not by a wide margin.

With her, and only with her, the dead in me is alive.

…Late at night, when the hour is none, I dream the dreams of the damned.

I never imagined being undead would be so much work,” Jeff lamented.“Being a ‘vampire’ takes no work at all,” Timothy emphasized vampire. “It’s surviving that takes all the work.

Again he shook his head. The world's gone mad, he thought. The dead walk about and I think nothing of it. The return of corpses has become trivial in import. How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough!

It had been a couple of years and I was neither dead, nor undead, which I ranked as an achievement.

The hand-plucked rose loses meaning as life is leached. Red love, once clutched to breast, putrefies and is thrown to the midden.The hand leaked life as meaning was pucked. Putrefaction clutched love and was thrown to the midden.

He was drop-dead gorgeous and I, well I was just ... dead." (Tera Hightower, Dead Chick Walking)

The return of the rain, beating out time on London's rooftops and pavements. Early morning Zombies sheltering beneath copies of the Standard whilst others ran screaming for cover in doorways because water from the heavens is holy and melts the undead.

I saw thousands of them. A sea of the dead that roared like an ocean! You would have heard them screaming toward you. It would have taken days to steer them away. Killing them? I don't think killing them would have been possible.

Immortality was overrated, as far as he was concerned. Hardy had enough problems as it was; living forever sounded like a death sentence for someone with his practical sensibilities.

Most people around here prefer undead drivers, so I never get a chance to make any money on steady contracts.

Something coming back from the dead was almost always bad news. Movies taught me that. For every one Jesus you get a million zombies.

I will not negotiate with the undead!

It had occurred to him that if the undead don't realize that they are dead, he might easily be one of them himself.

What is it like.... what is it like to be dead?' Evan looked at him with his dull, unblinking blue eyes, ' I don't know, what is it like...... to be alive?

He pinched the remaining chapters’ pages delicately between his fingers and sighed. He always hated reaching the end of a good book.

As any avid reader knew, a good read deserved a good seat.

To think that she had read the same elegiac prose he now beheld with such quiet awe made his heart sing.

Can’t call ‘em zombies anymore,” sighed Manny. He seemed almost wistful. “Now we gotta be all politically correct. It’s like the Cold Wars never happened.

Even in death she was more beautiful to him than she ever was alive.

The sooner the rebirth, the prettier the corpse.

The answer to enemies who heal annoyingly fast is always, always decapitation. That is why swords will never go out of style.

Pulling back, like a savage carnivore at its prey, it tore a large chunk of meat rendering his left arm useless...regardless he did not require it for long.