Mike Mullin Quotes

Only survivors are allowed the luxury of sadness.

Darla had been doing something by the fire. Now she returned and began stripping the blanket off me. I grabbed it before she could pull it away from my groin, to preserve my modesty.
Let go. There's nothing there I haven't seen. Who do you think undressed you, anyway? And honestly, I've seen better equipment on goats.

We were tired, hungry, and wrapped in multiple layers of filthy winter clothing. None of that mattered to me; I was in love. I thought Darla was, too--but maybe with the bulldozer.

So I thought I'd feel different afterward, after the visible neon sign proclaiming 'virgin' had blinked out on my forehead. I'd spent years obessessing about it, so it seemed like somthing should have changed. Maybe it would have if I'd still been at Ceder Falls High School surrounded by the gossip and the braggadocio of teenage boys. But on my uncle's farm, nobody noticed, or at least nobody said anything. The next day, like every day, we dug corn, chopped wood, and carried water. And it didn't really change much between Darla and me, either. Yes, making love was fun, but it wasn't really any more fun than anything we'd already been doing together. Just different.

The next few hours were, well, how to describe it? Ask someone to lock you in a box with no light, nobody to talk to, and then have them beat on it with a tree limb to make a hideous sound. Do that for hours, and if you're still not bat-shit crazy, you'll know how we felt.

Maybe we were ghosts of a sort, spirits from the world that had died when the volcano erupted.

When I was eleven or twelve, we had this real old guy as a Sunday school teacher. Mom said he'd been in some war: Iraq, Vietnam ... I forget. Anyway, almost every class he'd say, "There are no atheists in foxholes, kids." At the time, it was just weird. What did we know about either atheists or foxholes? Nothing. But I sort of understood it now.

I'd spent almost every minute with Darla for the last five weeks; being separated was … uncomfortable. It felt a bit like being naked in a room full of clothed people.

Hunger of choice is a painful luxury; hunger of necessity is terrifying torture.

That whiff of smoke was enough to transform my sithere-trembling terror into get-the-hell-out-of-here terror.

But unlike thunder, this didn't stop. It went on and on, machine-gun style, as if Zeus had loaded his bolts into an M60 with an inexhaustible ammo crate.

I didn't say anything - just held up my hands and shuffled backward toward the door. Antagonizing a little old lady holding a shotgun seemed like a very bad idea.

I was glad nobody had noticed.I might have been offended if my uncle had punched me in the shoulder and said something inane like, "so you`re a man now.

I hate to disappoint, but I just lay there, curled in a ball, shaking in pure terror.

I never would have guessed that matches and lighters would be among the things I'd miss the most if civilization collapsed

I felt bad about dirtying their comforter with my nasty clothes, but who knew what might happen later. If something else bizarre went down and I had to run, I sure didn't want to do it butt naked.

I used to think that teachers who gave homework on weekends should be forced to grade papers for an eternity in hell.

For the first time ever, I felt ashamed of my species. The volcano had taken our homes, our food, our automobiles, and our airplanes, but it hadn't taken our humanity. No, we'd given that up on our own.

The bookcase was filled with computer games, history books, and sci-fi novels in about equal proportions. Odd reading choices, maybe, but I just thought of it as past and future history.

I wanted, needed to see her so badly that it woke me up at night.

But even more than I wanted to check out and give my emotional wounds time to scab over, I wanted to live.

The most important part of seeing Darla every night wasn't the fooling around. It was the few minutes we talked while holding each other, the feeling of security I got with her, the feeling of being understood and loved. Before the eruption, I wouldn't have believed that I could cuddle up every night with the girl who starred in my dreams and not be totally preoccupied with sex. But the trek across Iowa had changed something. I wanted, needed to see her so badly that it woke me up at night. But making out was incidental to my need – nice when it happened, but secondary to the simple pleasure of sleeping beside her.

Condoms instantly shot to the number-one position on my mental list of must-find survival supplies, far ahead of food, water, and a way across the Mississippi River.

I'd never heard any noise quite so welcome as the click that a shotgun made when it wasn't killing me.

I both laid and sucked eggs? That didn't make sense.