“One of the things is that in times of severe disorder, you can't worry about the dead, only the living.”

“We all make basic assumptions about things in life, but sometimes those assumptions are WRONG. We must never trust in what we assume, only in what we KNOW.”

“This was selfish and wasteful. Cowardly. Nobody should voluntarily give up on life. If it was your time to die, death would calmly claim you. Otherwise it was your duty to press on and live. P29”

“The thing about real life is, when you do something stupid, it normally costs you. In books the heroes can make as many mistakes as they like. It doesn't matter what they do, because everything works out in the end. They'll beat the bad guys and put things right and everything ends up cool.In real life, vacuum cleaners kill spiders. If you cross a busy road without looking, you get whacked by a car. If you fall from a tree, you break some bones. Real life's nasty. It's cruel. It doesn't care about heroes and happy endings and the way things should be. In real life, bad things happen. People die. Fights are lost. Evil often wins. I just wanted to make that clear before I begun.”

“War," Beranabus murmurs, face crinkling. "Most humans know nothing of true warfare. They wage their silly territorial battles, kill each other ruthlessly and freely, and consider themselves experts on war and suffering. But the real war has always been ahead of them, unseen, unimagined. Enemies who can't be killed by normal weapons, who have their base in an alternate universe, who are interested only in slaughtering every living being on the face of the planet.”

“It’s one thing to go into a fight knowing you’ll probably lose. Quite another to be told that to win, you must offer up your throat to be slit.”

“Life is a challenge" he once told me, "and only those who rise to the challenge truly know what it means to live.”