We’re here, and then we’re gone, and it’s not about the time we’re here, but what we do with the time.
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.
You never know when the truth will come home. You can’t choose the time. The time chooses you.
But hope is no less realistic than despair. It is still our choice whether to live in light or lie down in darkness.
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.
Poets never die, I thought. They just fail in the end.
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.
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.
Are you okay?” I (Cassie) call up to him.”Um. Define okay.” (Ben)”Okay means you’re not bleeding to death.””I’m okay.
And if humanity is the last war, then I am the battlefield.
This is the first rule of the last war:Trust No One
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.
Who wants to read a book when you can blow something up?
Without trust there’s no cooperation. And without cooperation there’s no progress. History stops.
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
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.
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.
We are humanity, the banner read. Wrong. We’re pale reflections of it, weak shadows, distant echoes.
Pain is necessary. Pain is life. Without pain there can be no joy.
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.
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 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 can only call someone crazy if there’s someone else who’s normal.
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.
If you don’t kill all of us all at once, those who remain will not be the weak.It’s the strong who remain, the bent but unbroken, like the iron rods that used to give this concrete its strength.
Nothing is more painful than the loneliness of being with someone who is never completely there.
To hold on, you have to find something you’re willing to die for.
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
We have just discovered our dear colleague butchered in a hotel room, and you wish to discuss literature?
Too many people say something when they really have nothing to say.
You can’t band together to fight without trust. And without trust, there was no hope.
In the 4th Wave, you can’t trust that people are still people. But you can trust that your gun is still your gun.
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.
My nose is broken,” I said. Damn that Dumbo. Made me self-conscious.”My ankle’s broken,” he said.”Then I’ll come to you.
The human brain has a marvelous capacity to screen and sort experience, protecting itself against the unbearable.
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.
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.
Because if I am the last one, then I am humanity.And if this is humanity’s last war, then I am the battlefield.
The monstrous act by definition demands a monster.
…there are more terrifying monstrosities in the world than Anthropophagi. Monstrosities who, with a smile and a comforting pat on the head, are willing to sacrifice a child upon the altar of their own overweening ambition and pride.
I confessed I did not have an opinion; I was only thirteen, and this was my very first dismemberment.
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.
The girl sleeping and the finisher, willing himself to finish her.Why didn’t he finish her?Why couldn’t he finish her?
The answer is they didn’t. They aren’t here, Razor. They never were it’s just us. It’s always been just us.
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.
As long as you draw breath anywhere -here or ten thousands miles from here- I will love you. I can’t help loving you, so I choose to hate you…to make my love bearable.
She hated him and loved him, longed for him and loathed him, and cursed herself for feeling anything at all
I’ve always sucked at games of chance. Always hated them for that reason.
There are some we cannot help but take an instant dislike to.
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.
We regarded each other across an expanse wider than the universe, within a space thinner than a razor’s edge.
Crazy people. They never think they’re crazy. Their craziness makes perfect sense to them.
This place can’t be heaven, it doesn’t have the right vibe.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Promises are priceless, and a kiss is a kind of promise, too.
Beside me the monstrumologist murmured, “I believe I am in hell, therefore I am there.
He didn’t like to see animals in captivity. When he looked into their eyes, something in their eyes looked back at him.
Despair is a wholly selfish response to fortune’s slings and arrows.
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.
Ah. And then you kill him.””No,” Arkwright replied patiently. “We are British. We avoid murder if we can help it.{…}
The nights did not come gently but seemed to slam down angrily upon the Earth.
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.
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.
Life is full of little ironies, but it’s also pockmarked with some the size of that big rock in Australia.
I always assumed it owed more to the fact that he didn’t like me.
Sullivan had her Crucifix Soldier and now I have mine. No. I am the soldier. Teacup is the cross.
If the enemy looks just like you, how do you fight him?
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.
Even the most sensitive person can get used to even the most insensitive things.
Tears welled in his eyes. It was like watching chocolate melt.
So cold your tears freeze against your cheeks.’It’s not my fault,’ I told Bear. ‘I don’t make the weather. You got a beef, take it up with God.’ That’s what I’ve been doing a lot lately: taking it up with
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.
We’re all dead…Some of us are just a little further along than others.
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.
They say no one knows the Bible better than the devil.
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.
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.
Self-pity is egotism undiluted, after all—self-centeredness in its purest form.
We’d stared into Death’s eyes and Death blinked first.
For a being more advanced than I am, he sure has a hard time answering a simple question
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.
You’re mortal, and only a mortal can afford to be romantic. When we conquered death, we murdered love.
You know you’ve reached a very sad place when the only person who can make you laugh is yourself.
Yes, my dear child, monsters are real. I happen to have one hanging in my basement.
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.
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.
How would you rather die?” she snapped. “Hiding under your bed or riding Thunder Mountain?