“Zander was always sneaking off to the library to get more books ... Guy would read anything. Said books were more interesting than people.”

“Peter held up the book he had been reading: 'Moby-Dick; or, The Whale'."To tell you the truth, I'm not even sure this is English," Peter said. "It's taken me most of today to get through a page.”

“He knew what he'd see; one more slack face, one more pair of eyes that had barely learned to read, one more soul that had stared into itself too long.”

“He breathed once more, holding the air in his chest, as if it were not air but something more--a sweet taste of freedom, of all cares lifted, everything over and done.”

“His father had always said, Son, the most important thing in life is to make a contribution. Who would have thought Kittridge’s contribution would be video-blogging from the front lines of the apocalypse?”

“Special Agent Brad Wolgast hated Texas. He hated everything about it.[...] He hated the billboards and the freeways and the faceless subdivisions and the Texas flag, which flew over everything, always as big as a circus tent; he hated the giant pickup trucks everybody drove, no matter that gas was thirteen bucks a gallon and the world was slowly seaming itself to death like a package of peas in a microwave. He hated the boots and the belts and the way people talked, ya'll this and ya'll that, as if they spent the day ropin' and ridin', not cleaning teeth and selling insurance and doing the books, like people did everywhere.”

“It was possible, he understood, for a person's life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more mistake in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were actually borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas, and for whatever reason, made them your own.”