#apocalyptic

The world was already a miserable place in the spring of that cursed year. The New Depression was at its height. Stocks fell, jobs were lost, and consumer consumption fell in a corporate death spiral as the aging technoczars were revealed to have feet of clay. Financial institutions underreacted, the government overreacted, and a society living on borrowed time paid for with borrowed dollars failed. Hard times and hunger came to the Western world, which was all the more of a shock because the generation that survived the last financial collapse had virtually died out. ↗

— E.E. Knight

#post-apocalypse #prophecy-in-fiction #age

Courage was no that hard to come by for children. No matter the hardships they faced, given a little love and encouragement, their spirits rebounded and thrived. Adults were different. Their habits and experiences made them inflexible, welding their routines into place, cementing their joys and hurts to create expectations of life that were not in line with the new realities. All around her, Cass saw the dazed expressions and the blank weariness. ↗

— Sophie Littlefield

#adults #children #courage #post-apocalyptic #courage

So what if I don't learn algebra?' 'Someday schools will be open again,' Mom said. 'Things will be normal. You need to do your work now for when that happens.' 'That's never going to happen,' Jon said. 'And even if schools do open up somewhere, they're not going to open up here. There aren't enough people left.' 'We don't know how many people are like us, holed up, making do until times get better.' 'I bet whoever they are, they aren't studying algebra,' Jon said. ↗

— Susan Beth Pfeffer

#apocalyptic #humor #ya #humor

One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory. You must remember this. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#contemporary #fiction #mythology #dreams

Keisuke: "It's alright for you to kill someone?" Akira: "As long as they have tags. According to the rules, if there's three people present, it's an official battle. I'm not sure how you're supposed to start it, though." Keisuke: "So killing people is just a game, huh?" Akira: "It's the only way to survive. ↗

— Suguro Chayamachi

#death #keisuke #killing #manga #post-apocalyptic

How stark everything became, at the end, all the wishes for one's children distilled by the world's swift cruelty into the desperate hope that death would take them fast. ↗

— Justin Cronin

#literary #poetic #death

Most folks don't have but a few days to a week's worth of food in their houses at any given time. When they run out, they'll have to forage. Only the fools will forage in town. The smart ones will look on the outskirts. ↗

— Edward M. Wolfe

#food #food-storage #fool #fools #forage

How can we be alive and not wonder about the stories we knit together this place we call the world? Without stories our universe is merely rocks and clouds and lava and blackness. It's a village scraped raw by warm waters leaving not a trace of what existed before. ↗

— Douglas Coupland

#dry-humor #humor #humor

You know how sometimes you tell yourself that you have a choice, but really you don't have a choice? Just because there are alternatives doesn't mean they apply to you. ↗

— Rick Yancey

#apocalypse #cassie #choices #fiction #horror

Not all the magic of earth is benevolent. ↗

— Alden Bell

#hopeful #reality #science-fiction #zombies #science