If anything, global response to the Rising only confirmed something that many Australians had quietly believed for quite some time: If forced to live in Australia for a year, most of the world's population would simply curl up in a fetal ball and die of terror.

Don't think she can breathe over there, chief." drawled Shaun. "Pretty sure she hasn't kicked the oxygen habit yet.

This is what I do know: A lie, however well-intended, can't prepare you for reality or change the world... To tell the truth is to provide armament against a world too full of cruelties to be defeated with simple falsehoods... It seems to me we owe the world--more, we owe ourselves--the exchange of comfort for the chance that maybe the truth can do what people always say it can. The truth may, given the opportunity, set us free.

If anything attacked us, we could just panic at it until it went away.

I was still wearing my shoes. The staff was paid to wash the sheets after every visit, and by the point we left the field, I’d dressed and undressed so many times in the course of decontamination that I never wanted to remove my clothes again. I’d just wear them until they dissolved, and then spend the rest of my life naked.

April frowned, irritation evident. “I did not consent to your presence,” she said peevishly. “Please depart, and attempt your political assassination on someone else’s property.

Sometimes in the news, "luck" is just a matter of "capitalizing on someone else's pain.