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.

Perhaps that is our doom, our human curse, to never really know one another.

Do you know how to tell who the enemy is, Cassie?

Self-pity is egotism undiluted, after all—self-centeredness in its purest form.

The harder survival becomes, the more you want to pull together. And the more you want to pull together, the harder survival becomes.

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.

The monstrous act by definition demands a monster.