He asks me what happened to my leg. I told him I was shot by a shark. He doesn't react. Doesn't seem confused or amused or anything. Like getting shot by a shark is a perfectly natural thing in the aftermath of the arrival.

And in more than half the pictures, she isn't looking at the camera; she's looking at him. Not the way I would look at Ben Parish, all squishy around the eyes. She looks at Evan fiercely, like, This here? It's mine

But monsters, I now know, come in all shapes and sizes, and only their appetite for human flesh defines them.

There's a hero in every heart waiting for the dragon to come out.

I don't care what the stars say about how small we are. One, even the smallest, weakest, most insignificant one, matters.

We are very much like them: indiscriminate killers, ruled by drives little acknowledged and less understood, mindlessly territorial and murderously jealous - the only significant difference being that they have yet to master our expertise in hypocrisy, the gift of our superior intellect that enables us to slaughter one another in droves, more often than not under the auspices of an approving god!

But hope is no less realistic than despair. It is still our choice whether to live in light or lie down in darkness.