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.

How do you rid the Earth of humans? Rid the humans of their humanity.

What boy my age didn’t dream of fleeing the well-tended lawn and lamp-lit street for the untamed wilderness, where grand adventure awaited on the other side of the horizon, where the stars burned undimmed in the velvet sky above his head and the virgin ground lay untrodden beneath his feet?

Then I strip the pants away from each leg, like peeling a banana. That's it, the perfect metaphor: peeling a banana.

It's an either/or world now.

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

She hated him and loved him, longed for him and loathed him, and cursed herself for feeling anything at all