Apocalypse Quotes

“The planet dies. Crickets chirp. Crickets survive, for now, among the crashed ships and broken bodies on this crumbling plain. Silver moss devours steel, and violet flowers choke the dead guns. If the planet lasted long enough, the vines that sprout from the corpses' mouths would grow berries.

It won't, and neither will they.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“War is what Homo sapiens do best.”
― Gerald Maclennon, Wrestling with Angels: An Anthology of Prose & Poetry 1962-2016 Revised

“But it's never wise to bet against any of the four horsemen long term. Their historical track record is horrifyingly good.”
― Dan Carlin, The End is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses

“How painful and absurd, this fantasy that your own
labors might in turn be redeemed by strangers centuries and perhaps continents away who would need to hear what you had to whisper, this delusion that you were doing anything other than babbling because you like the sounds it makes, like a child blowing bubbles into milk.”
― Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

“And so we issue a warning to the diligent reader, the one who will read in rigorous compliance with the page numbers: Your meticulousness and zeal will get you nowhere, for even following that path you will wind up in chaos. And chaos is a dark well where I cannot guarantee you'll find any comforting notions.”
― Pedro Cabiya, Wicked Weeds: A Zombie Novel

“Where men can't live gods fare no be�tter. You'll see. It's be�tter to be alone. So I hope that's not true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing so I hope it's not true. Things will be be�tter when everybody's gone.
They will?
Sure they will.
Better for who?
Everybody.
Everybody.
Sure. We'll all be better off. We'll all breathe easier.
That's good to know.
Yes it is. When we're all gone at last then there'll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too. He'll be out in the road there with nothing to do and nobody to do it to. He'll say: Where did everybody go? And that's how it will be. What's wrong with that?”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Prana heals.
Prana kills.
Prana helps you evolve.
The twinge of guilt comes. It’s hard not to be glad that the Apocalypse happened. Or they never could’ve found the highest possibilities for humans.”
― Misba, The High Auction

“Maybe she would have done more good as a playwright than as a doctor, after all—clichés were like plaque in the arteries of the imagination, they clogged the sense of what was possible. Maybe if enough people had worked to demolish clichés, the world wouldn’t have ended.”
― Charlie Jane Anders, As Good as New

“It wasn’t that people were shocked but the instinctive dread of the unknown had people rooted to the spot. The planet was a beating heart of humanity eager and dreading the unknown emerging out of the ship. They wanted to know what was in the ship yet dreaded it all the same.”
― N.K. Aning, First Contact

“The literature of apocalypse is scary stuff, the kind of thing that can give religion a bad name, because people so often use it as a means of controlling others, instilling dread by invoking a boogeyman God. ... [Apocalyptic literature] is not a detailed prediction of the future, or an invitation to withdraw from the concerns of this world. It is a wake-up call, one that uses intensely poetic language and imagery to sharpen our awareness of God's presence in and promise for the world.

The word "apocalypse" comes from the Greek for "uncovering" or "revealing," which makes it a word about possibilities. And while uncovering something we'd just as soon keep hidden is a frightening prospect, the point of apocalypse is not to frighten us into submission. Although it is often criticized as "pie-in-the-sky" fantasizing, I believe its purpose is to teach us to think about "next-year-country" in a way that sanctifies our lives here and now. "Next-year-country" is a treasured idiom of the western Dakotas, an accurate description of the landscape that farmers and ranchers dwell in - next year rains will come at the right time; next year I won't get hailed out; next year winter won't set in before I have my hay hauled in for winter feeding. I don't know a single person on the land who uses the idea of "next year" as an excuse not to keep on reading the earth, not to look for the signs that mean you've got to get out and do the field work when the time is right. Maybe we're meant to use apocaly[tic literature in the same way: not as an allowance to indulge in an otherworldly fixation but as an injunction to pay closer attention to the world around us. When I am disturbed by the images of apocalypse, I find it helpful to remember the words of a fourth-centry monk about the task of reading scripture as "working the earth of the heart," for it is only in a disturbed, ploughted0up ground that the seeds we plant for grain can grow.”
― Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith

“The future is a source of fear not because we know what will happen, and that it will be terrible, but because we know so little, and have so little control. The apocalyptic sensibility, the apocalyptic style, is seductive because it offers a way out of this situation: it vaults us over the epistemological chasm of the future, clear into a final destination, the end of all things. Out of the murk of time emerges the clear shape of a vision, a revelation, and you can see at last where the whole mess is headed. All of it--history, politics, struggle, life--is near to an end, and the relief is palpable.”
― Mark O'Connell, Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

“He might look like a beast but Bree’s fingertips gliding over the evidence of his failure is what makes him forget just for a moment that he’s the monster who broke the world.”
― Ilse V. Rensburg, Twisted Fate

“An apocalypse, by its nature, is kind of doomy and gloomy.”
― Jim Butcher, Battle Ground

“That’s what we’re dealing with, Ken. Call it mass hysteria, if you like. Or a return to a simpler time. What did he call it? A ‘golden age.’ The authorities don’t know how to handle it. In most cases, they’re joining in. See that London feed, top left? The feisty blonde with the riding crop and a bulldog tattoo on her butt? No, wait, it’s gone now. That big guy rolled back on top. He won’t last long. Wait for it. Wait. Right. There she is. That, my suddenly rich and famous friend, is the British prime minister.”
― John West, Let Sleeping Gods Lie

“...If you have to go round digging up graves to prove your own sanity then you've probably already lost it.”
― Adrian J. Walker, The End of the World Running Club

“The world only ends for a minute. Then we all keep going like nothing happened.”
― Kalen Dion

“This plague has come to destroy mankind.”
― J.D. Beresford, Goslings

“Once the sounds of birds were reassuring. Once, it was a sign of danger if the birds had gone quiet. Now, the sounds of birds would be foreign, even wrong. Now, it was always quiet because there was always danger.”
― M.P. Fitzgerald, A Happy Bureaucracy

“She regarded Arthur with the corners of her eyes as she drove, noting that he was wearing a seatbelt, even though there was no more law requiring him to do so. There was no seatbelt around her, and in truth if she was the van's only occupant there wouldn't be any pants either.”
― M.P. Fitzgerald, A Happy Bureaucracy

“The phenomenon of iterative evolution or the repeated evolution of a species from the same ancestor at different times may be the plan on a larger scale [for mankind], especially after a global purge.”
― Aneesh Abraham, Super Dense Crush Load: The Story of Man Redux

“A society’s technological dependence increases exponentially over time, as does its helplessness when deprived of it.”
― Tom B. Night, Mind Painter

“So, this is how the world ends, eh? Not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a disgusting gurgling sound, he thought.”
― Tom B. Night, Mind Painter

“Tragically ironic, isn't it? How nuclear weapons represent both our species' mastery over the very foundations of nature, as well as our utter inability to master our most primitive instincts.”
― Tom B. Night, Mind Painter

“The lights went down in the city, an artificial sun shining on the bay.”
― Tom B. Night, Mind Painter

“Would intelligent life evolve again on this planet, and if so would it have the means—like opposable thumbs or a way to store knowledge outside of brains—to build technology? Dolphins could have lived for eternity and never developed the capability to annihilate their species or the world, much less colonize another.”
― Tom B. Night, Mind Painter

“We stood on the shoulders of giants, but we fell off.”
― Tom B. Night, Mind Painter

“She distrusted the US/UN agencies, she disapproved of enhanced humans on principle, and the whole Watchmaker rumour was so apocalyptic that she had difficulty crediting it could really happen in her own lifetime. She knew this was exactly how people would feel just before the real apocalypse, that nearly everyone who’d faced some intrusive threat to their everyday existence – war, revolution, genocide, purges, disaster – had faced it with the firm conviction that things like this just didn’t happen or didn’t happen here or didn’t happen to people like them.”
― Ken MacLeod, The Star Fraction

“I don’t have to look outside to know, I got it all here. Fuck. The world’s actually fucking ending.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“Wszystkie światy lecą to na dół, to w górę - człowiek każdy, robak każdy krzyczy - "Ja Bogiem" - i co jeden po drugim konają - gasną komety i słońca - Chrystus nas już nie zbawi - krzyż swój wziął w ręce obie i rzucił w otchłań. - Czy słyszysz, jak ten krzyż, nadzieja milionów, rozbija się o gwiazdy, łamie się, pęka, rozlatuje w kawałki, coraz niżej i niżej - aż tuman wielki powstał z jego odłamków? - Najświętsza Bogarodzica jedna się jeszcze modli i gwiazdy, Jej służebnice, nie odbiegły Jej dotąd - ale i Ona pójdzie, kędy idzie świat cały.”
― Zygmunt Krasiński, Nie-Boska komedia

“Tripping across a country pasture with Junie Black... spreading out a blanket on the hot, dry hillside, among the smells of grass and afternoon sun. No, not there. Is that gone, too? Hollow outward form instead of substance; the sun not actually shining, the day not actually warm at all but cold, gray and quietly raining.”
― philip k. dick, Time Out of Joint