“Mark Spitz didn't ask about Harry. You never asked about the characters that disappeared from a Last Night story. You knew the answer. The plague had a knack for narrative closure.”

“Pain could be killed. Sadness could not, but the drugs did shut its mouth for a time.”

“A society manufactures the heroes it requires.”

“New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.”

“Mark Spitz had met plenty of the divine-retribution folks over the months. This was their moment; they were umbrella salesmen standing outside a subway entrance in a downpour. The human race deserv...”

“Nowdays, Rosie the Rivetere was a former soccer mom who had just opened her own catering business when Last Night came down and her husband and kids were eaten by a parking attendant at the local m...”

“But these weren't the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around--they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, ...”

“You guys know about vampires? You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? Theres this idea that monsters dont have reflections in a mirror. And what Ive always thought isnt that monsters d...”

“The real world is where the monsters are.”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”

“Just as in the body, eye and ear develop as organs of perception, as senses for bodily processes, so does a man develop in himself soul and spiritual organs of perception through which the soul and...”

“The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.”

“An ordinary mirror is silvered at the back but the window of the night train has darkness behind the glass. My face and the faces of other travellers were now mirrored on this darkness in a success...”