The Last Town Quotes
"When your world falls apart, cling to the familiar."
"How do you find meaning when you’re one of seven billion?"
"With that knowledge, they’ll abide in a full understanding that in the face of these enormous stakes, their lives have taken on incomprehensible worth."
"Don’t try to talk yet. Would you like me to explain what’s happening?"
"You’re not in a hospital. You haven’t been in a car accident or suffered a heart attack. Nothing like that."
"To perpetuate our species of course. To reign over this planet."
"I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. This is Neil Armstrong going down the steps of Apollo 11 to stand on the moon for the first time."
"I’m not saying I loved it here, but you know what? I didn’t worry about bills. I didn’t worry about our mortgage. You and I got to run a bakery."
"If this is the end, I’m glad I know the truth."
"It reminded him of the sickening, random way that fate and chance figured into battle—if you had stepped left instead of right, the bullet would have gone through your eye instead of your friend’s."
"Ethan thinking, One quarter of humanity was just wiped out."
"The need to be close to her and Ben was overwhelming."
"I know you’re scared, but you’re our light, Maggie. No matter what you see coming down that tunnel, stand your ground. If you run, we all die. Understand?"
"Ethan’s quads burned from sprinting through the tunnel, and despite the cold, his undershirt was soaked with sweat."
"Brightly colored algae rims the bank, and jets of mineral water bubble where they surface up from the molten underworld below."
"It’s a good twenty or thirty degrees colder than yesterday—barely above zero—and plumes of steam ascend in a perpetual cloud off the hot springs."
"In the center of the meadow, he stops and glasses the terrain through the scope of his Winchester. For the moment at least, the world is his alone."
"I would rather Carl be dead and I would rather die today than live in that sick illusion of a town for one more hour. Like prisoners. Like slaves."
"To Hassler’s knowledge, no nomad had ever returned from a long-term mission."
"Everything he’d experienced and encountered in his three and a half years in the wild was contained in those pages."
"Tears running down his face as he’d watched a life-altering sunset turn the skeletal ruins of the Portland skyline from rust to bronze."
"The nights he’d sat contentedly before a fire, smoking his pipe."
"He followed the path of a stream until it branched west. The white noise of the water dwindled away."
"Every step held meaning, and each one more than the last."
"Life in the superstructure shook out in a strange rhythm of work and leisure."
"Was there even a point to the creation of books and art when humanity lived on the precipice of extinction?"
"The stories had poured out of him and the paper had accumulated beside his desk like snowfall."
"He didn’t know what he would do with all these stories."
"For fourteen years he’d lived in this tiny space, and it exuded the messy comfort of home."
"He was driving at forty miles per hour into a wall of rock."
"She even questioned the reality as she moved to her husband and placed her hands on his shoulders."
"I could stay here," he offers. "Keep you company…"
"The large outcropping that masked the entrance to the superstructure loomed a hundred yards ahead."
"He had the pedal down against the floorboard, the heat of the overworked engine coming through the vents."
"The truth can be a dangerous thing for the weak-minded."
"Without him, you'd have been dead for centuries. How dare you question the man who gave you this life."
"We're on the verge of extinction. Might as well do it with grace."
"All I care about at this point is causing your husband pain. Nothing more."
"I alone have the key to what will save us all. I’m literally the one man in the world who can save the world."
"I’ve been gone three and a half years. Came back through the fence yesterday at dawn."
"You’ve only been back in our lives for barely a month."
"The scary thing, the truly scary thing, is that she believes him."
"My loyalty, my devotion to you has been total."
"I’ve seen him change in the last month. I’ve seen glimmers of—"
"Life is too hard and too short not to be with the one you love. So choose me."
"There’s no right or wrong anymore, Ethan. There’s only survival."
"We’re here because of you, Ethan. My wife, my son—"
"It’s a precious thing, Ethan, and you’d better care for it."
"Are your pants frozen too?" he asked. "Yeah, I'm freezing my ass off. Do you think it means something that you and I both climbed up here to jump on the same night?"
"I don’t care if we jump together or climb down together. But whichever it is, let’s just not do it alone."
"I gave you food. I gave you shelter. I gave you purpose. I protected you from the knowledge you couldn’t handle. From the harsh truth of the world that exists beyond the fence. And each of you had to do one thing. One! Goddamn! Thing! Obey me."
"God didn’t get exiled. It was the other guy."
"Kindness. Decency. That’s what it is to be human. At our best at least."
"Species evolve. In the beginning, man was a hunter-gatherer. Communicated through grunts and gestures. Then we invented agriculture and language. We became capable of kindness."
"If you do what you know in your heart is right, if you give people the freedom to choose their own fate, their own destiny—"
"What if this doesn’t work? What if we all die? That’s a real possibility."
"Maybe that isn’t such a bad thing. We had our chance. We failed."
"I’m just so grateful that we’re together in this moment."
"They say time heals all wounds…Well, we’ve got plenty of it…Enough time for empires to rise and fall. For species to change. For the world to become a kinder place."