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.

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

When the power goes out, we jump up to…To what? It’s weird. We’re so used to electricity, when it’s gone, we don’t know what to do. So we jump up or squeal or start jabbering like idiots. We panic. It’s like someone cut off our oxygen.

That’s it,” he said bitterly. “Cry, Cassie. Cry for her. Cry for all the children. They can’t hear you and they can’t see you and can’t feel how really bad you feel, but cry for them. A tear for each of them, fill up the fucking ocean, cry.

My first favourite book was ‘Are You My Mother?’ A picture book about a lost bird. After that my favourites changed almost yearly. I loved everything by Roald Dahl, but my favourite was probably ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.’ A librarian gave me a first edition of that book, which I treasure.

I always feel trepidation at the beginning of every project. I worry about so many things. Time to get it right, the skill to do it justice, the will to finish. I also worry about more mundane things, like what if my computer crashes and I’ve forgotten to back up the manuscript?

Being born at the tag-end of the baby boom, I was destined (or doomed, depending on how you look at it) to fall in love with sci-fi. It was one of my first literary loves, as a matter of fact.

When civilizations collide, it usually isn’t the more primitive one that prevails.

‘The 5th Wave’ is sci-fi, but I tried very hard to ground the story in very human terms and in those universal themes that transcend genre. How do we define ourselves? What, exactly, does it mean to be human? What remains after everything we trust, everything we believe in and rely upon, has been stripped...

Time for the world to end.

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...

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.

With an enemy like that, who needs friends?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I am more than the sum of my fear.

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...

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

Ah. And then you kill him.””No,” Arkwright replied patiently. “We are British. We avoid murder if we can help it.{…}

We never see ourselves the way we truly are, do we, Will? The mirror lies to us.

The aliens of ‘The 5th Wave’ are not the aliens we’ve imagined. Not the aliens we’d like to attack us.

I got a very late start at fatherhood. I’m a late bloomer in general. It took me seven years to get through four years of college. I was five years away from 40 before I had a family, and I had never been around kids much at all. All of a sudden, I was around...

Human beings are remarkably resilient. When you think about it, our species has been teetering upon the edge of the existential cliff since Hiroshima. In short, we endure.

It wasn’t aliens that first made us gear up for war; it was our fellow humans.

How would you rather die?” she snapped. “Hiding under your bed or riding Thunder Mountain?

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.

Speaking of fruit, I’m down–I mean, he’s down–to his underwear.

I dab at the blood with some gauze from the kit, fighting back hysterical giggles. I blame it on the unbearable stress, not on the fact that I’m wiping Evan Walker’s ass.

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

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

We’d stared into Death’s eyes and Death blinked first.

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.

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.

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

And John Kearns whispered into my ear: “Do you see it now? *You* are the nest. *You* are the hatchling. *You* are the chrysalis. *You* are the progeny. *You* are the rot that falls from the stars. All of us–you and I and poor, dear Pellinore. Behold the face of the magnificum, child. And despair.”Though...

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.

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.

I prefer not to call them demons. It demeans their nature. “But isn’t that what they are?””We should pity them more than fear them Alfred. They were angels once.””Yea, but didn’t you say they rebelled against God? They got what they deserved.””Perhaps.” He sighed. “Yet do we not all hope and pray that we ourselves...

Ya no hay nada que no tenga importancia.

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.

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

Sullivan had her Crucifix Soldier and now I have mine. No. I am the soldier. Teacup is the cross.

Great sci-fi has never shied from tackling the Big Questions, though really great sci-fi never forgets to entertain us along the way. Shock and awe applies to art, as well.

It’s been a while since I’ve written a novel aimed at the adult market, but I never sit down and say to myself, ‘Okay, now I’m going to write something for us old folks.’ I get gripped by an idea, and I go where the idea takes me.

‘Now I lay me down to sleep…’” To me, just random noise. Gibberish. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but I felt that, when it came to God, there was a broken promise in there somewhere.