Rick Yancey

...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.

The monstrous act by definition demands a monster.

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

With an enemy like that, who needs friends?

It kills me. The way he trusted. LIke the way we trusted before they came and blue the whole goddamned world apart. Trusted that when it got dark there would be light. Trusted that when you wanted a fucking strawberry Frappuccino you could plop your ass in the car, drive down the streed, and get yourself a fucking strawberry Frappuccino!

The bent but unbroken ones.

In the nineteenth century, The Romantics viewed Nature as benign, a glowing reflection of God's grace. Now we know better. Nature is brutal and, if it is feminine, she's not the kind of woman you can trust. Human beings may be her finest achievement yet, but when you get right down to brass tacks, we're meat. AIDS and organisms like streptococcus don't give a crap that we subdued the earth or produced a Shakespeare...

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.

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.

They made a major mistake," he blurted out, "the dumb bastards, when they didn't start by killing you first.""Benjamin Thomas Parish, that was the sweetest and most bizarre compliment anyone's ever given me."I kissed him on the cheek. He kissed me on the mouth."You know," I whispered, "a year ago, I would have sold my soul for that."He shook his head. "Not worth it." 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.

The human brain has a marvelous capacity to screen and sort experience, protecting itself against the unbearable.

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.

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.

This is what the Others have done to us. You can__ 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.

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.

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.

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.