Rick Yancey Quotes

To hold on, you have to find something you're willing to die for.

~ Rick Yancey

And it occurs to me that there’s no real difference between us, the living and the dead; it’s just a matter of tense: past-dead and future-dead

~ Rick Yancey

We have just discovered our dear colleague butchered in a hotel room, and you wish to discuss literature?

~ Rick Yancey

Too many people say something when they really have nothing to say.

~ Rick Yancey

His body is pressed against my back, his arm is wrapped protectively around my waist, his breath a delicious tickle against my neck. The room is very cold; it would be nice to climb under the covers, but I don’t want to move. I don’t want him to move. I run my fingers along his bare forearm, remembering the warmth of his lips, the silkiness of his hair between my fingers. The boy who never sleeps, sleeping. Coming to rest upon the Cassiopeian shore, an island in the middle of a sea of blood. You have your promise, and I have you.I can’t trust him. I have to trust him.I can’t stay with him. I can’t leave him behind.

~ Rick Yancey

Do you believe in God, Evan?”“Sure I do.”“I don’t. I mean, I don’t know. I did before the Others came. Or thought I did, when I thought about it at all. And then they came and…” I have to stop for a second to collect myself. “Maybe there’s a God. Sammy thinks there is. But he also thinks there’s a Santa Claus. Still, every night I said his prayer with him, and it didn’t have anything to do with me. It was about Sammy and what he believed, and if you could have seen him take that fake soldier’s hand and follow him onto that bus…”I’m losing it, and it doesn’t matter to me much. Crying is always easier in the dark. Suddenly my cold hand is blanketed by Evan’s warmer one, and his palm is as soft and smooth as the pillowcase beneath my cheek.“It kills me,” I sob. “The way he trusted. Like the way we trusted before they came and blew the whole goddamned world apart. Trusted that when it got dark there would be light. Trusted that when you wanted a fucking strawberry Frappuccino you could plop your ass in the car, drive down the street, and get yourself a fucking strawberry Frappuccino! Trusted…

~ Rick Yancey

Beyond their immaculate design, the reason sharks rule the ocean is their complete indifference to everything except feeding, procreation, and defending their territory. The shark does not love. It feels no empathy. It trusts nothing. It lives in perfect harmony with its environment because it has no aspirations or desires. And no pity. A shark feels no sorrow, no remorse, hopes for nothing, dreams of nothing, has no illusions about itself or anything beyond itself.

~ Rick Yancey

You can't band together to fight without trust. And without trust, there was no hope.

~ Rick Yancey

In the 4th Wave, you can't trust that people are still people. But you can trust that your gun is still your gun.

~ Rick Yancey

This is what the Others have done to us. You can’t band together to fight without trust. And without trust, there was no hope. How do you rid the Earth of humans? Rid the humans of their humanity.

~ Rick Yancey

I've decided to trust him, but like somebody once said, you can't force yourself to trust. So you put all your doubts in a little box and bury it deep and then try to forget where you buried it. My problem is that buried box is like a scab I can't stop picking at.

~ Rick Yancey

The shadow raised its arm high in the air and I knew - I knew before I heard my name - that he'd found me again, keeper of the promise he couldn't make, the one I had marked with my blood and who had marked me with his tears, a Silencer all right, my silencer, stumbling toward me in the impossibly pure light of a late winter's sunrise promising spring.

~ Rick Yancey

The human brain has a marvelous capacity to screen and sort experience, protecting itself against the unbearable.

~ Rick Yancey

To conquer, you must endure not just your own suffering but the suffering of others. Indifference is the ultimate evolutionary achievement, the highest rung on nature's ladder.

~ Rick Yancey

But we fall only that we might rise, Alfred. All of us fall; all of us, as you say, screw up. Falling is not important. It is how we get up after the fall that's important.

~ Rick Yancey

In the nineteenth century, The Romantics viewed Nature as benign, a glowing reflection of God's grace. Now we know better. Nature is brutal and, if it is feminine, she's not the kind of woman you can trust. Human beings may be her finest achievement yet, but when you get right down to brass tacks, we're meat. AIDS and organisms like streptococcus don't give a crap that we subdued the earth or produced a Shakespeare...

~ Rick Yancey

The bent but unbroken ones.

~ Rick Yancey

It kills me. The way he trusted. LIke the way we trusted before they came and blue the whole goddamned world apart. Trusted that when it got dark there would be light. Trusted that when you wanted a fucking strawberry Frappuccino you could plop your ass in the car, drive down the streed, and get yourself a fucking strawberry Frappuccino!

~ Rick Yancey

With an enemy like that, who needs friends?

~ Rick Yancey

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

The monstrous act by definition demands a monster.

~ Rick Yancey

...there are more terrifying monstrosities in the world than Anthropophagi. Monstrosities who, with a smile and a comforting pat on the head, are willing to sacrifice a child upon the altar of their own overweening ambition and pride.

~ Rick Yancey

I confessed I did not have an opinion; I was only thirteen, and this was my very first dismemberment.

~ Rick Yancey

Nothing makes us love something more than the loss of it.

~ Rick Yancey

There's the bullshit you know that you know, the bullshit you don't know and know you don't know, and the bullshit you just think you know but really don't.

~ Rick Yancey

The girl sleeping and the finisher, willing himself to finish her.Why didn't he finish her?Why couldn't he finish her?

~ Rick Yancey

The answer is they didn't. They aren't here, Razor. They never were it's just us. It's always been just us.

~ Rick Yancey

It's hopeless. And it's stupid. It's suicidal. But love is a weapon they have no answer for. They know how you think, but they can't know what you feel.

~ Rick Yancey

As long as you draw breath anywhere -here or ten thousands miles from here- I will love you. I can't help loving you, so I choose to hate you...to make my love bearable.

~ Rick Yancey

She hated him and loved him, longed for him and loathed him, and cursed herself for feeling anything at all

~ Rick Yancey

I've always sucked at games of chance. Always hated them for that reason.

~ Rick Yancey

There are some we cannot help but take an instant dislike to.

~ Rick Yancey

They were afraid the longer we pretended to be human, the more human we would become.”“And who would want that?”“I didn’t think I would,” he admits. “Until I became one.”“When you…‘woke up’ in Evan?”He shakes his head and says simply, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world, “When I woke up in you, Cassie. I wasn’t fully human until I saw myself in your eyes.”And then there are real human tears in his real human eyes, and it’s my turn to hold him while his heart breaks. My turn to see myself in his eyes.Somebody might say that I’m not the only one lying in the enemy’s arms.I am humanity, but who is Evan Walker? Human and Other. Both and neither. By loving me, he belongs to no one.He doesn’t see it that way.

~ Rick Yancey

And John Kearns whispered into my ear: Do you see it now? *You* are the nest. *You* are the hatchling. *You* are the chrysalis. *You* are the progeny. *You* are the rot that falls from the stars. All of us--you and I and poor, dear Pellinore. Behold the face of the magnificum, child. And despair.Though I was sickened by the sight, I looked. In the bower of the beast at the top of the world, I beheld the face of the magnificum, and I did not turn away.

~ Rick Yancey

I want him to touch me again. I want to feel his hands, as soft as clouds. But I’m afraid if he touches me, all seven billion billion billion atoms that make up my body will blow apart and scatter across the universe.

~ Rick Yancey

We regarded each other across an expanse wider than the universe, within a space thinner than a razor's edge.

~ Rick Yancey

You haven't heard a damn word I've said. See, this is why I can't stand your kinds. You light your candles and mumble your latin spells and pray to a god who isn't there, doesn't care, or is just plain crazy or cruel or both. The world burns and you praise the asshole who either set it or let it.

~ Rick Yancey

Crazy people. They never think they're crazy. Their craziness makes perfect sense to them.

~ Rick Yancey

This place can't be heaven, it doesn't have the right vibe.

~ Rick Yancey

I'm a little panicky when I realize he's not here. It's a lot easier to push down my doubt when he's with me. When I can see those eyes the color of melted chocolate and hear his deep voice that falls over me like a warm blanket on a cold night.

~ Rick Yancey