"How baffling it is that we imagined cities incinerated by alien bombs and death rays when all they really needed was Mother Nature and time."

"Even the most sensitive person can get used to even the most insensitive things."

"It's always been this way, I wanted to tell him. We bear the unbearable. We endure the unendurable. We do what must be done until we ourselves are undone."

"But if I'm it, the last of my kind, the last page of human history, like hell I'm going to let the story end this way. I may be the last one, but I am the one still standing. I am the one turning to face the faceless hunter in the woods on an abandoned highway. I am the one not running but facing. Because if I am the last one, then I am humanity. And if this is humanity's last war, then I am the battlefield."

"It's almost dawn. You can feel it coming. The world holds its breath, because there's really no guarantee that the sun will rise. That there was a yesterday doesn't mean there will be a tomorrow."

"And if humanity is the last war, then I am the battlefield."

"We have just discovered our dear colleague butchered in a hotel room, and you wish to discuss literature?"

"Nothing makes us love something more than the loss of it."

"Sometimes in my tent, last at night, I think I can hear the stars scraping, against the sky."

"Too many people say something when they really have nothing to say."

"You can only call someone crazy if there's someone else who's normal."

"Onto his stomach. Then knees. Then hands. His elbows quivered, his wrists threatened to buckle under his own weight. Self-centered, stubborn, sentimental, childish, vain. I am humanity. Cynical, naive, kind, cruel, soft as down, hard as tungsten steel.I am humanityHe crawled.I am humanity.He fell.I am humanity.He got up."

"In the early days, it was nearly omnipresent, a constant background noise, like the hum of traffic on a busy highway: the sound of a human being in pain."

"Then the door flew open and Mr. Faulks told us to head over to the gym. I thought that was really smart. Get all of us in one place so the aliens didn't have to waste a lot of ammunition."

"I do not mean to mock or ridicule your life's work, for in one way at least it mimics my own: We have dedicated our lives to the pursuit of phantoms. The difference is the nature of those phantoms. Mine exist between other men's ears; yours live solely between your own."

"People change spouses more often than they clean out closets. And every time they say, 'This is the one. This is the person I'm going to spend eternity with.' Then forty or fifty years go by and you're just sick of each other, utterly sick, and it's on to the next 'true love.' My question is what good is eternity if you are eternally falling in and out of love?"

"Time for the world to end."

"We're all dead...Some of us are just a little further along than others."

"We'd stared into Death's eyes and Death blinked first."

"I may be the last one, but I am the one still standing. I am the one turning to face the faceless hunter in the woods on an abandoned highway. I am the one not running, not staying, but facing. Because if I am the last one, then I am humanity. And if this is humanity's last war, then I am the battlefield."

"But the most wonderful thing of all, our highest achievement and the one thing for which I pray we will always be remembered, is stuffing wads of polyester into an anatomically incorrect, cartoonish ideal of one of nature's most fearsome predators for no other reason than to soothe a child."

"It wasn't a good fake smile. You could always tell when she was faking, because she didn't look friendly; she looked like she was going to throw up."

"If the enemy looks just like you, how do you fight him?"

"I've decided to trust him, but like somebody once said, you can't force yourself to trust. So you put all your doubts in a little box and bury it deep and then try to forget where you buried it. My problem is that buried box is like a scab I can't stop picking at."

"The world existed for a very long time before this particular set of seven billion billion atoms came along and it will go right on after they're scattered up, down and sideways."

"The shadow raised its arm high in the air and I knew - I knew before I heard my name - that he'd found me again, keeper of the promise he couldn't make, the one I had marked with my blood and who had marked me with his tears, a Silencer all right, my silencer, stumbling toward me in the impossibly pure light of a late winter's sunrise promising spring."

"That's a stupid question,' said Malachi. 'Because he didn't warn him. He didn't warn anyone.''No, it's a philosophical question,' Kearns corrected him. 'Which makes it useless, not stupid."

"There are some we cannot help but take an instant dislike to."

"You're never perfectly safe. No human being on Earth ever is or ever was. To live is to risk your life, your heart, everything."

"Yes, my dear child, monsters are real. I happen to have one hanging in my basement."

"You can't band together to fight without trust. And without trust, there was no hope."

"Everything's going to be okay', because that's what I wanted him to say and it's what he wanted to say and that's what you do when the curtain is falling - you give the line that the audience wants to hear."

"I confessed I did not have an opinion; I was only thirteen, and this was my very first dismemberment."

"You're mortal, and only a mortal can afford to be romantic. When we conquered death, we murdered love."

"You never know when the truth will come home. You can't choose the time. The time chooses you."

"We'd stared into the face of Death, and Death blinked first. You'd think that would make us feel brave and invincible. It didn't."

"The doctor was a private man, engaged in a dark and dangerous business, and could ill afford the prying eyes and gossiping tongue of the servant class."

"You haven't heard a damn word I've said. See, this is why I can't stand your kinds. You light your candles and mumble your latin spells and pray to a god who isn't there, doesn't care, or is just plain crazy or cruel or both. The world burns and you praise the asshole who either set it or let it."

"This place can't be heaven, it doesn't have the right vibe."

"I am a shark. A shark who dreamed he was a man."

"And, for one" ten thousandth of a second, all of it fell away, the despair and grief and anger and pain and hunger, and the old Ben Parish rose from the dead. The eyes that impaled. The smile that slayed. In another moment, he would fade, slide back into the new Ben, the one called Zombie, and I understood something I hadn't before: He was dead, the object of my schoolgirl desires, just as the schoolgirl who desired him was dead."

"I'm a little panicky when I realize he's not here. It's a lot easier to push down my doubt when he's with me. When I can see those eyes the color of melted chocolate and hear his deep voice that falls over me like a warm blanket on a cold night."

"Understand their hatred is beyond human comprehension. They abhor the Creator and so also the creation. Whatever brings joy, whatever brings peace, whatever redeems the dark deed or relieves the terrors of the night and their enemies."

"That's the cost. That's the price. Get ready, because when you crush the humanity out of humans, you're left with humans with no humanity.In other words, you get what you pay for, motherfucker."

"To conquer, you must endure not just your own suffering but the suffering of others. Indifference is the ultimate evolutionary achievement, the highest rung on nature's ladder."

"Ten thousand years to build civilization, ten months to tear it down, and each day lasted ten times longer than the one before, and the nights lasted ten times as long as the days. The only thing more excruciating than the boredom of those hours was the terror of knowing that any minute they could end."

"I always assumed it owed more to the fact that he didn't like me."

"The bent but unbroken ones."

"But we fall only that we might rise, Alfred. All of us fall; all of us, as you say, screw up. Falling is not important. It is how we get up after the fall that's important."

"People die. Love endures."