After another half second, he's locked me in a bear hug, crushing me into his chest and lifting my feet a couple inches off the ground as I kick furiously with my heels, twisting my head back and forth, snapping at his forearm with my teeth. And the whole time his lips tickling the delicate skin of my ear. "Cassie. Don't. Cassie..." "Let...me...go." "That's been the whole problem. I can't.

Maybe the last human being on Earth won't die of starvation or exposure or as a meal of wild animals. Maybe the last one to die will be killed by the last one alive.

The world is a clock winding down.

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

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!

I didn't show up here to give your life purpose now that your life's over. That's up to you to figure out.

That's what you do when the curtain is falling--you give the line that the audience wants to hear.