Rick Yancey Quotes

People die. Love endures.

~ Rick Yancey

We’re here, and then we’re gone, and it’s not about the time we’re here, but what we do with the time.

~ Rick Yancey

Love is forever. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be love. The world is beautiful. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be the world.

~ Rick Yancey

But if I'm it, the last of my kind, the last page of human history, like hell I'm going to let the story end this way. I may be the last one, but I am the one still standing. I am the one turning to face the faceless hunter in the woods on an abandoned highway. I am the one not running but facing. Because if I am the last one, then I am humanity. And if this is humanity's last war, then I am the battlefield.

~ Rick Yancey

You never know when the truth will come home. You can’t choose the time. The time chooses you.

~ Rick Yancey

But hope is no less realistic than despair. It is still our choice whether to live in light or lie down in darkness.

~ Rick Yancey

We'd stared into the face of Death, and Death blinked first. You'd think that would make us feel brave and invincible. It didn't.

~ Rick Yancey

And, for one– ten thousandth of a second, all of it fell away, the despair and grief and anger and pain and hunger, and the old Ben Parish rose from the dead. The eyes that impaled. The smile that slayed. In another moment, he would fade, slide back into the new Ben, the one called Zombie, and I understood something I hadn’t before: He was dead, the object of my schoolgirl desires, just as the schoolgirl who desired him was dead.

~ Rick Yancey

Poets never die, I thought. They just fail in the end.

~ Rick Yancey

Cities are more than the sum of their infrastructure. They transcend brick and mortar, concrete and steel. They're the vessels into which human knowledge is poured.

~ Rick Yancey

How baffling it is that we imagined cities incinerated by alien bombs and death rays when all they really needed was Mother Nature and time.

~ Rick Yancey

Are you okay? I (Cassie) call up to him.Um. Define okay. (Ben)Okay means you're not bleeding to death.I'm okay.

~ Rick Yancey

And if humanity is the last war, then I am the battlefield.

~ Rick Yancey

Our hearts, the war.Her body, the battlefield.

~ Rick Yancey

This is the first rule of the last war:Trust No One

~ Rick Yancey

The experience was like running into someone you hadn't seen since middle school - you recognize them, but what you really notice is the ways they've changed. They don't match your memory of how they should look and for a second you're thrown off, because your memory of them IS them.

~ Rick Yancey

I am like the water that runs over me, immune to permanence, recycling endlessly. I am water; I am life. The form may change, but the substance stays the same. Strike me down and I will rise again. Vincit qui patitur.

~ Rick Yancey

Who wants to read a book when you can blow something up?

~ Rick Yancey

Without trust there's no cooperation. And without cooperation there's no progress. History stops.

~ Rick Yancey

That’s the cost. That’s the price. Get ready, because when you crush the humanity out of humans, you’re left with humans with no humanity.In other words, you get what you pay for, motherfucker

~ Rick Yancey

Onto his stomach. Then knees. Then hands. His elbows quivered, his wrists threatened to buckle under his own weight. Self-centered, stubborn, sentimental, childish, vain. I am humanity. Cynical, naive, kind, cruel, soft as down, hard as tungsten steel.I am humanityHe crawled.I am humanity.He fell.I am humanity.He got up.

~ Rick Yancey

Everything's going to be okay', because that's what I wanted him to say and it's what he wanted to say and that's what you do when the curtain is falling — you give the line that the audience wants to hear.

~ Rick Yancey

That’s the cost. That’s the price. Get ready, because when you crush the humanity out of humans, you’re left with humans with no humanity.In other words, you get what you pay for, motherfucker.

~ Rick Yancey

That's my name. Not Cassie for Cassandra. Or Cassie for Cassidy. And it's not Cassie for Cassiopeia. Not anymore. I am more than her now.I am all of them, Evan and Ben and Marika and Megan and Sam. I am Dumbo and Poundcake and Teacup. I am all the ones you emptied, the ones you corrupted, the ones you discarded, the thousands you thought you killed, but who live in me.But I am more than this. I am all those they remember, the ones they loved, everyone they knew, and everyone they only heard about. How many are contained in me? Count the stars. Go on, number the grains of sand. That's me.I am humanity.

~ Rick Yancey

It's the ancient instinct: In times of great danger, be wary of strangers. Trust no one outside your circle. But there's another instinct, far older, as old as life itself, nearly impossible for the human mind to override: Protect the young at all costs. Preserve the future. - Vosch

~ Rick Yancey

I may be the last one, but I am the one still standing. I am the one turning to face the faceless hunter in the woods on an abandoned highway. I am the one not running, not staying, but facing. Because if I am the last one, then I am humanity. And if this is humanity's last war, then I am the battlefield

~ Rick Yancey

He was a finisher who could not finish. He was the heart of a hunter who lacked the heart to kill.In her journal she had written I am humanity, and something in those three words split him in two.She was the may fly, here for a day, then gone. She was the last star, burning bright in a sea of limitless black.Erase the human.In a burst of blinding light, the star Cassiopeia exploded and the world went black.Evan Walker had been undone.

~ Rick Yancey

Libraries, museums, universities, everything we designed and built over six thousand years. Cities are more than the sum of their infrastructure. They transcend brick and mortar, concrete and steel. They're the vessels into which human knowledge is poured.

~ Rick Yancey

We are humanity, the banner read. Wrong. We’re pale reflections of it, weak shadows, distant echoes.

~ Rick Yancey

Pain is necessary. Pain is life. Without pain there can be no joy.

~ Rick Yancey

You're never perfectly safe. No human being on Earth ever is or ever was. To live is to risk your life, your heart, everything.

~ Rick Yancey

The world existed for a very long time before this particular set of seven billion billion atoms came along and it will go right on after they're scattered up, down and sideways.

~ Rick Yancey

The doctor was a private man, engaged in a dark and dangerous business, and could ill afford the prying eyes and gossiping tongue of the servant class.

~ Rick Yancey

These are the secrets I have kept. This is the trust I never betrayed.But he is dead now and has been for more than forty years, the one who gave me his trust, the one for whom I kept these secrets.The one who saved me . . . and the one who cursed me.

~ Rick Yancey

You can only call someone crazy if there's someone else who's normal.

~ Rick Yancey

You know how sometimes you tell yourself that you have a choice, but really you don't have a choice? Just because there are alternatives doesn't mean they apply to you.

~ Rick Yancey

Is this how humanity waves good-bye?Hell no.

~ Rick Yancey

I brought Sammy inside and put him to bed. Said his prayer with him. “‘Now I lay me down to sleep…’” To me, just random noise. Gibberish. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but I felt that, when it came to God, there was a broken promise in there somewhere.

~ Rick Yancey

If you don't kill all of us all at once, those who remain will not be the weak.It's the strong who remain, the bent but unbroken, like the iron rods that used to give this concrete its strength.

~ Rick Yancey

Nothing is more painful than the loneliness of being with someone who is never completely there.

~ Rick Yancey