"It ends with all of us dead, doesn’t it? she asked Little Pete. It ends when evil wins and we all surrender. The sad …"

"Power would go to whoever won this fight. Still Caine hesitated. A big, warm bed. A beautiful girl to share it with. …"

"God doesn’t ask for human sacrifices, Astrid said. Doesn’t He? Brittney smirked. What am I, Astrid? What are any of u…"

"Do you really want to kill a little boy? No matter what your so-called God tells you, isn’t it wrong? When your belie…"

"Right and wrong doesn’t come from God. It’s inside us. And we know it. And even if God appears right in front of us, …"

"You were right, it’s one big open-air asylum. Virtue nodded solemnly and glanced back at the church. Yeah, but there’…"

"It was more possible that the human race possessed some spark of divinity that was worth cultivating than that a myst…"

"We were content to be undisturbed in our little backwater, Union Grove, Washington County, in a place once called the…"

"I had one of those steel thermal mugs you carried everywhere with you as a kind of signifier of how busy, and therefo…"

"In the early twenty-first century farming had all but died out here. We got our food from the supermarket, and not ev…"