Top 450 Rick Yancey Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “God doesn’t call the equipped, son. God equips the called. And you have been called.”

— Rick Yancey

2. “Some things you can never leave behind. They don’t belong to the past. They belong to you.”

— Rick Yancey

3. “Vincit qui patitur.”

— Rick Yancey

4. “Our enemy is fear. Blinding, reason-killing fear. Fear consumes the truth and poisons all the evidence, leading us to false assumptions and irrational conclusions.”

— Rick Yancey

5. “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

6. “When you look death in the eye and death blinks first, nothing seems impossible.”

— Rick Yancey

7. “Cursing is the crutch of an unimaginative mind.”

— Rick Yancey

8. “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

9. “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

10. “The first rule: Trust no one. Which leads to the second rule: The only way to stay alive as long as possible is to stay alone as long as possible. Now I’ve broken both.”

— Rick Yancey

11. “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

12. “No hope without faith, no faith without hope, no love without trust, no trust without love. Remove one and the entire human house cards collapses.”

— Rick Yancey

13. “Some things you don’t have to promise. You just do.”

— Rick Yancey

14. “It’s almost dawn. You can feel it coming. The world holds its breath, because there’s really no guarantee that the sun will rise. That there was a yesterday doesn’t mean there will be a tomorrow.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

16. “Oh, Bob. Gonna miss you. Gonna miss you so bad.”

— Rick Yancey

17. “Even the longest journey is a circle, and history will always cycle back to the place where it began. From the missal: “Remember you are dust and unto dust you shall return.”

— Rick Yancey

18. “To hold on, you have to find something you’re willing to die for.”

— Rick Yancey

19. “Lies are complicated. The truth is simple.”

— Rick Yancey

20. “Some things down to the smallest of things, are worth the sum of all things.”

— Rick Yancey

21. “How do you rid the Earth of humans? Rid the humans of their humanity.”

— Rick Yancey

22. “Sometimes in my tent, late at night, I think I can hear the stars scraping against the sky.”

— Rick Yancey

23. “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

24. “I don’t care what the stars say about how small we are. One, even the smallest, weakest, most insignificant one, matters.”

— Rick Yancey

25. “The world is a clock winding down.”

— Rick Yancey

26. “It’s hard to plan for what comes next when what comes next is not something you planned for.”

— Rick Yancey

27. “I thought I knew what loneliness was before he found me, but I had no clue. You don’t know what real loneliness is until you’ve known the opposite.”

— Rick Yancey

28. “Soon I will fall asleep and I will wake from this terrible dream. The endless night will fall, and I will rise. I long for that night. I do not fear it. I have had my fill of fear. I have stared too long into the abyss, and now the abyss stares back at me.”

— Rick Yancey

29. “That’s what you do when the curtain is falling – you give the line that the audience wants to hear.”

— Rick Yancey

30. “Without trust there’s no cooperation. And without cooperation there’s no progress. History stops.”

— Rick Yancey

31. “You don’t run from the people who need you. You fight for them. You fight beside them. No matter the cost. No matter the risk.”

— Rick Yancey

32. “I’m not encouraged by the silence. I can think of no benign reason for it. I’m afraid we may expect something closer to Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas than a scene from Close Encounters, and we all know how that turned out for the Native Americans.”

— Rick Yancey

33. “The uncertainty of my own experience is crushing. I am drowning in an infinite sea. Sinking slowly, the weight of the lightless depths forcing me down, forcing the air from my lungs, squeezing the blood from my heart.”

— Rick Yancey

34. “You don’t know what real loneliness is until you’ve known the opposite.”

— Rick Yancey

35. “You want to compare yourself to an insect, Cassie? If you’re an insect, then you’re a mayfly. Here for a day and then gone. That doesn’t have anything to do with the Others. It’s always been that way. 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

36. “He shakes his head. I touch his knee, then pull my hand back quickly. After the first touch, touching becomes too easy.”

— Rick Yancey

37. “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

38. “What boy my age didn’t dream of fleeing the well-tended lawn and lamp-lit street for the untamed wilderness, where grand adventure awaited on the other side of the horizon, where the stars burned undimmed in the velvet sky above his head and the virgin ground lay untrodden beneath his feet?”

— Rick Yancey

39. “To hell with monsters and to hell with men. There is no difference to me.”

— Rick Yancey

40. “Every face is new now, every face a stranger’s face.”

— Rick Yancey

41. “The darkness slips; it cannot hold.”

— Rick Yancey

42. “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

43. “It’s the strong who remain, the bent but unbroken, like the iron rods that used to give this concrete its strength. Floods, fires, earthquakes, disease, starvation, betrayal, isolation, murder. What doesn’t kill us sharpens us. Hardens us. Schools us.”

— Rick Yancey

44. “There’s a hero in every heart waiting for the dragon to come out.”

— Rick Yancey

45. “Maybe the last human being on Earth won’t die of starvation or exposure or as a meal of wild animals. Maybe the last one to die will be killed by the last one alive.”

— Rick Yancey

46. “Even the most sensitive person can get used to even the most insensitive thing. Cruelty isn’t a personality trait. Cruelty is a habit.”

— Rick Yancey

47. “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

48. “Don’t you get it yet? The minute we decide that one person doesn’t matter anymore, they’ve won.“... “Beneath a sky crowded with a billion stars. I don’t care what the stars say about how small we are. One, even the smallest, weakest, most insignificant one, matters.”

— Rick Yancey

49. “When I cry – when I let myself cry – that’s who I cry for. I don’t cry for myself. I cry for the Cassie that’s gone. And I wonder what that Cassie would think of me. The Cassie who kills.”

— Rick Yancey

50. “Yes, my dear child, monsters are real. I happen to have one hanging in my basement.”

— Rick Yancey