Top 450 Rick Yancey Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Rick Yancey

2. “Vincit qui patitur.”

— Rick Yancey

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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

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

— Rick Yancey

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

15. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

18. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

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

— Rick Yancey

29. “I found you, but in finding you, I lost myself.”

— Rick Yancey

30. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

32. “He shuts up just one time after nearly a month of the verbal diarrhea.”

— Rick Yancey

33. “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

34. “The world will burn for a hundred years. Fire will consume the things we made from wood and plastic and rubber and cloth, then water and wind and time will chew the stone and steel into dust. How baffling it is that we imagined cities incinerated by alien bombs and death rays when all they needed was Mother Nature and time.”

— Rick Yancey

35. “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

36. “Dad would fix this. Because that’s what dads do. They fix things.”

— Rick Yancey

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

41. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

43. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

46. “Just because a man is a homicidal maniac doesn’t make him wrong.”

— Rick Yancey

47. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

49. “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

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

— Rick Yancey