In the 4th Wave, you can't trust that people are still people. But you can trust that your gun is still your gun.

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

For a being more advanced than I am, he sure has a hard time answering a simple question

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.

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.

It's just me and the invader inside me and the dead - not just my family, but all the dead, all however-many-billion of them, reaching for me as I run. Reaching. Running. 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.

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.

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

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