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1 " How do you know?" Red repeated each word slowly, enunciating every consonant. "If the CDC brewed up something in their lab and it accidentally was let loose in the world, do you think they would tell you? "
― Christina Henry , The Girl in Red
2 " Grandmas didn't die from stuff like that. Grandmas went on and on, enduring year after year, shriveled and worn but somehow ageless. "
3 " One thing Red had learned from years of reading and movie watching was that people were far scarier than any disease or zombie or alien or face-eating monster. "
4 " ...it was never the Event - illness, asteroid, nuclear war, whatever - that was the problem. It was what people did after. And people always reduced to their least human denominators when things went bad. "
5 " She is just a woman trying not to get killed in a world that doesn’t look anything like the one she grew up in, the one that was perfectly sane and normal and boring until three months ago. "
6 " Red didn’t like to think of herself as a killer, but she wasn’t about to let herself get eaten up just because she was a woman alone in the woods. "
7 " Why is it that assholes just go on and on, even when the world would be a better place if they just dropped dead?""Because their assholery protects them. They're so full of bile that the virus can't get a toehold," Adam said. "
8 " She resolutely turned her back, because she didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to get caught again. She didn’t want to get dragged into some meaningless fight between men who wanted to control the way this new world was going to spin. "
9 " But the truth about quarantines was that you could never catch everyone in your net, not even if you tagged and tracked every person who’d come in contact with the Typhoid Mary. And in this case, there didn’t seem to be a Typhoid Mary. Instead, pockets of sickness had just bloomed up like hideous flowers in several places at once, and then spread so fast that tracing the vectors was something like impossible. And “the government”—well, Red had zero confidence that the government would be able to do anything. Not because it was full of bad people or there was a giant conspiracy or anything like that. "
10 " She wasn’t under any obligation to be polite to someone who thought she was his next victim. "
11 " We all die in the end," Mama said. "What we do before the end is what counts". "
12 " People ought to help each other, especially when the world was ending. "
13 " And people always reduced to their least human denominators when things went bad. "
14 " She was not following his script, and he didn’t know how to improvise. "