“Sometimes the rumour of an army is just as effective as the army itself.”

“We run down the right fork, Manchee at our heels, the night and a dusty road stretching out in front of us, an army and a disaster behind us, me and Viola, running side by side.”

“But what he's forgetting," she says. "What he's forgotting is that me and Todd, we ran halfway across this planet together, by ourselves. We beat his craziest preacher. We outran an entire army and survived being shot and beaten and chased and we bloody well stayed alive this whole time without being blown up or tortured to death or dying in battle or anything."She takes her hand of Lee so she's balancing just against me."Me and Todd? Together against the Mayor?" She smiles. "He doesn't stand a chance.”

“The green things of this world are just wondrous, aren’t they?” his mother went on. “We work so hard to get rid of them when sometimes they’re the very thing that saves us.”

“And what other kind of man would you want leading you into battle?” he says, reading my Noise. “What other kind of man is suitable for war?”A monster, I think, remembering what Ben told me once. War makes monsters of men.“Wrong,” says the Mayor. “It’s war that makes us men in the first place. Until there’s war, we are only children.”Another blast of the horn comes roaring down at us, so loud it nearly takes our heads off and it puts the army off its stride for a second or two.We look up the road to the bottom of the hill. We see Spackle torches gathering there to meet us.“Ready to grow up, Todd?” the Mayor asks.”

“Sometimes people need to lie to themselves most of all.”

“The answer is that it does not matter what you think, the monster said, because your mind will contradict itself a hundred times each day.”