"You're safe here. Perfectly safe. That phrase still haunts me. Haunts me because it's always been a lie. It was a lie before they came and it's still a lie. 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. Otherwise, you're just a walking corpse. You're a zombie."

"Who wants to read a book when you can blow something up?"

"We are humanity, the banner read. Wrong. We're pale reflections of it, weak shadows, distant echoes."

"I am like the water that runs over me, immune to permanence, recycling endlessly. I am water; I am life. The form may change, but the substance stays the same. Strike me down and I will rise again. Vincit qui patitur."

"The cold stars spun to the ancient rhythm, the august march of an everlasting symphony. They are old, the stars, and their memory is long."

"He barely knew I existed. I knew some of the same people he knew, but I was a girl in the background, several degrees of seperation removed."

"To hold on, you have to find something you're willing to die for."

"Pain is necessary. Pain is life. Without pain there can be no joy."

"Beyond their immaculate design, the reason sharks rule the ocean is their complete indifference to everything except feeding, procreation, and defending their territory. The shark does not love. It feels no empathy. It trusts nothing. It lives in perfect harmony with its environment because it has no aspirations or desires. And no pity. A shark feels no sorrow, no remorse, hopes for nothing, dreams of nothing, has no illusions about itself or anything beyond itself."

"With an enemy like that, who needs friends?"

"The girl sleeping and the finisher, willing himself to finish her.Why didn't he finish her?Why couldn't he finish her?"

"He didn't like to see animals in captivity. When he looked into their eyes, something in their eyes looked back at him."

"It's been a long time since humans were prey animals. A hundred thousand years or so. But buried deep in our genes the memory remains: the awareness of the gazelle, the instinct of the antelope. The wind whispers through the grass. A shadow flits between the trees. And up speaks the little voice that goes. Shhhh, it's close now. Close."

"But hope is no less realistic than despair. It is still our choice whether to live in light or lie down in darkness."

"Madness is a wholly human malady borne in a brain too evolved-or not quite evolved enough-to bear the awful burden of its own existence."

"The answer is they didn't. They aren't here, Razor. They never were it's just us. It's always been just us."

"They say no one knows the Bible better than the devil."

"And it occurs to me that there's no real difference between us, the living and the dead; it's just a matter of tense: past-dead and future-dead."

"These are the secrets I have kept. This is the trust I never betrayed.But he is dead now and has been for more than forty years, the one who gave me his trust, the one for whom I kept these secrets.The one who saved me . . . and the one who cursed me."

"Cities are more than the sum of their infrastructure. They transcend brick and mortar, concrete and steel. They're the vessels into which human knowledge is poured."

"We regarded each other across an expanse wider than the universe, within a space thinner than a razor's edge."

"I want him to touch me again. I want to feel his hands, as soft as clouds. But I'm afraid if he touches me, all seven billion billion billion atoms that make up my body will blow apart and scatter across the universe."

"Nothing is more painful than the loneliness of being with someone who is never completely there."

"I've always sucked at games of chance. Always hated them for that reason."

"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."

"I would just have to find a hog, slaughter it, butcher it, cure the meat, then fry it up. Thinking about the bacon-the potential of bacon-gives me hope. Not all is lost if bacon isn't. Seriously."

"Crazy people. They never think they're crazy. Their craziness makes perfect sense to them."

"I should have bailed. That little voice had my back. That little voice is older than I am. It's older than the oldest person who ever lived. I should have listened to that voice."

"Self-pity is egotism undiluted, after all-self-centeredness in its purest form."

"This is what the Others have done to us. You can't band together to fight without trust. And without trust, there was no hope. How do you rid the Earth of humans? Rid the humans of their humanity."

"He was a finisher who could not finish. He was the heart of a hunter who lacked the heart to kill.In her journal she had written I am humanity, and something in those three words split him in two.She was the may fly, here for a day, then gone. She was the last star, burning bright in a sea of limitless black.Erase the human.In a burst of blinding light, the star Cassiopeia exploded and the world went black.Evan Walker had been undone."

"It wasn't aliens that first made us gear up for war, it was our fellow humans."

"What is life without death, Beneficent? You of all people can answer that question. A never-ending orgy of emptiness that you stuff with meaningless activity. Everything is disposable, including your relationships--especially your your relationships."

"The spring rains woke the dormant tillers, and bright green shoots sprang from the moist earth and rose like sleepers stretching after a long nap. As spring gave way to summer, the bright green stalks darkened, became tan, turned golden brown. The days grew long and hot. Thick towers of swirling black clouds brought rain, and the brown stems glistened in the perpetual twilight that dwelled beneath the canopy. The wheat rose and the ripening heads bent in the prairie wind, a rippling curtain, an endless, undulating sea that stretched to the horizon."

"The experience was like running into someone you hadn't seen since middle school - you recognize them, but what you really notice is the ways they've changed. They don't match your memory of how they should look and for a second you're thrown off, because your memory of them IS them."

"Without trust there's no cooperation. And without cooperation there's no progress. History stops."

"Tears welled in his eyes. It was like watching chocolate melt."

"Is this how humanity waves good-bye?Hell no."

"When I cry - when I let myself cry - that's who I cry for. I don't cry for myself. I cry for the Cassie that's gone.And I wonder what that Cassie would think of me.The Cassie who kills."

"I give her my best smile. Before the alien Armageddon happened, I was known for my smile. Not bragging too much, but I had to be careful never to smile while I drove. It had the capacity to blind oncoming traffic. But it has absolutely no effect on Ringer. She doesn't squint in its overwhelming luminescence. She doesn't even blink."

"I, um, I thought you might want this back.I pull out the battered old teddy bear and hold it toward him. He frowns and shakes his head and doesn't reach for it, and I feel like he's punched me in the gut.Then my baby brother slaps that damned bear out of my hand and crushes his face against my chest, and beneath the odors of sweat and strong soap I can smell it, his smell, Sammy's, my brother's."

"The beautiful wooden board on a stand in my father's study. The gleaming ivory pieces. The stern king. The haughty queen. The noble knight. The pious bishop. And the game itself, the way each piece contributed its individual power to the whole. It was simple. It was complex. It was savage; it was elegant. It was a dance; it was a war. It was finite and eternal. It was life."

"We have survived the death of our childhood. We are soldiers now, maybe the last soldiers who will ever fight, the Earth's final and only hope, united as one in the spirit of vengeance."

"Despair is a wholly selfish response to fortune's slings and arrows."

"It's hopeless. And it's stupid. It's suicidal. But love is a weapon they have no answer for. They know how you think, but they can't know what you feel."

"The nights did not come gently but seemed to slam down angrily upon the Earth."

"Because if I am the last one, then I am humanity.And if this is humanity's last war, then I am the battlefield."

"Love is forever. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be love. The world is beautiful. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be the world."

"Life is full of little ironies, but it's also pockmarked with some the size of that big rock in Australia."

"It's an alien apocalypse! Quick, grab the beer!"