“Look behind you now.Do you feel in your heart a slight hastening of its beat, and a powerful sense that something momentous is about to happen?... Perhaps, then, this is the hour that Mary Hightower takes to the sky with thousands Afterlights heading toward Memphis.... Perhaps this is the moment that Nick, the Chocolate Ogre, arrives in the same city in search for Allie, only to find that he has no idea where to look.... Perhaps this is the very instant that a monster called the McGill arrives there as well, aching to ease his pain by sharing his misery - not only with his new minions, but with anyone he can.... And perhaps you can sense, in some small twisting loop of your gut, the covergence of the wrong, of the right, and the woefully misguided. If you do, then pay sharp attention to the moment you wake, and the moment you fall asleep.... For maybe then you will know, without a shadow of doubt, which is which.”

“We're roughage," Tyger said. "If we don't cause a little intestinal distress, no one knows we're there.”

“No true hero ever believes that they are one.”

“I'm against solutions that are worse than the problem. Like old women who want their hair dyed the color of shoe polish to hide the gray.”

“but laugh, laugh, laugh, because if you ever stop laughing, it might just tear you apart”

“Hayden shouts, "To the new Teen Uprising!”

“I'm going out to find her, to make things right, or atleast properly wrong.”

“How easy is murder when one calls it by a different name? How much easier is it for the conscience to condone “reaping” than “killing”—and when one knows that death isn’t the end, does it stop the killing hand for fear of retribution, or does it simply make it easier to kill, because, if life continues, how can murder be murder at all?”

“Mary believes she was put on earth to bring an end to the living world.”Both Nick and Mikey just stared at her.“What do you mean … end?” asked Mikey.“End means end. Complete and total destruction. She wants to kill everyone and everything. She wants to bring down every building, burn every forest, empty every ocean of life. She wants to turn the earth into a dead planet …”

“Walls don't fall without effort.”

“It was easier to deal with Tennyson when he was fighting me; but having him on my side was frightening, because now I didn't know who the enemy was.”