Pines: Wayward Pines: 1 (The Wayward Pines Trilogy)

by Blake Crouch

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.

“You spend time with your son?” “Much as I can,” he’d answered, but his father had caught the lie in his eyes. “It’ll be your loss, Ethan. Day’ll come, when he’s grown and it’s too late, that you’d give a kingdom to go back and spend a single hour with your son as a boy. To hold him. Read a book to him. Throw a ball with a person in whose eyes you can do no wrong. He doesn’t see your failings yet. He looks at you with pure love and it won’t last, so you revel in it while it’s here.”

“The people in town, for the most part, can’t handle the truth of what’s out there. But you…you can’t handle the lie.

You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. To the earth…a million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can’t imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven’t got the humility to try. We’ve been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we’re gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us. —Michael Crichton