City of Ash and Red Quotes

“Danger warnings are more common than actual danger. And yet when danger does finally strike, it does so without warning.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, City of Ash and Red

“Fear and rumors and viruses shared a similar nature. They bore a tremendous vitality of their own, oblivious to human efforts to stamp them out. They could spread rapidly even while offering no clue to their routes of transmission. And they would burn for a long, long time, like dry grassland, only to vanish in an instant as if doused with water.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, City of Ash and Red

“And if plundering and pillaging were a means of livelihood, then the only true asset was to own nothing.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, City of Ash and Red

“Stories continued to abound regarding the epidemic, but none of it amounted to anything more than hearsay. No one knew the truth. The more exaggerated the information, the further the rumors spread. But the one comfort was the fact that, still, far more deaths were caused by traffic accidents, chronic disease, and old age than by the virus making its rounds.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, City of Ash and Red

“The biggest impact the epidemic had on people was not infection and death but rather suspicion of others for fear of exactly that.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, City of Ash and Red

“This was the age of epidemics. You couldn’t be too careful. The fact that the routes of contagion were uncertain meant that you could catch the virus from the air or from a simple brush of skin.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, City of Ash and Red

“Epidemics are like rat poison: they strengthen the race by leaving behind only the strongest rats. And just like rats, the human species is not easily exterminated.”
― Hye-Young Pyun, City of Ash and Red