Tomorrow, When the War Began (Tomorrow, #1)

by John Marsden

Well, I'd better stop biting my tongue and start biting the bullet.

Let's make like dressmakers and get the tuck in there.'

We were relying on finding water in Hell, assuming we could get in there.

We'd thought that we were among the first humans to invade this basin, but humans had invaded everything, everywhere. They didn't have to walk into a place to invade it. Even Hell was not immune.

No, Hell wasn't anything to do with places, Hell was all to do with people. Maybe Hell was people.

you can have ninety per cent of the work done in the first hour, but the other ten per cent takes at least two hours. That's Ellie's Law.

Some people wake up fast and some people wake up slow. I wake up dead.

It suddenly seemed so obvious that if we had a future, it would be in Hell.

Make like a hockey player sweetheart; get the puck out of here.

we'd retreated to the paradise of Hell.

nothing could be seen of the tiny humans who crawled like bugs over the landscape, committing their monstrous and beautiful acts.

Human laws, moral laws, religious laws, they seemed artificial and basic, almost childlike. I had a sense within me—often not much more than a striving—to find the right thing to do, and I had to have faith in that sense. Call it anything—instinct, conscience, imagination—but what it felt like was a constant testing of everything I did against some kind of boundaries within me; checking, checking, all the time. Perhaps war criminals and mass murderers did the same checking against the same boundaries and got the encouragement they needed to keep going down the path they had taken. How then could I know that I was different?

That's where that method breaks down. Without some higher moral authority, anything can be justified.

When we did go on into the culvert we travelled like snails rather than crocodiles or soldiers, crawling silently along. I don't know about the others but I could easily have left a glistening trail behind me, a trail of sweat.