Top 450 Rick Yancey Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “Because love is irrational,” I tell Vosch. “It doesn’t follow rules. Not even its own rules. Love is the one thing in the universe that’s unpredictable.”

— Rick Yancey

55. “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

56. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

58. “There’s an old saying about truth setting you free. Don’t buy it. Sometimes the truth slams the cell door shut and throws a thousand bolts.”

— Rick Yancey

59. “What doesn’t kill us sharpens us. Hardens us. Schools us. You’re beating plowshares into swords, Vosch. You are remaking us. We are the clay, and you are Michelangelo. And we will be your masterpiece.”

— Rick Yancey

60. “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.”

— Rick Yancey

61. “You can only call someone crazy if there’s someone else who’s normal. Like good and evil. If everything was good, then nothing would be good.”

— Rick Yancey

62. “It isn’t that the lies are too beautiful to resist. It’s that the truth is too hideous to face.”

— Rick Yancey

63. “You can’t make yourself believe anything... But you can let yourself believe. You can allow yourself to trust.”

— Rick Yancey

64. “Because love is the most dangerous weapon in the world. It’s more unstable than uranium.”

— Rick Yancey

65. “Because we will die, but at least we will die unbroken.”

— Rick Yancey

66. “Climb onto my shoulders. I will not let you fall.”

— Rick Yancey

67. “I will teach you to love death. I will empty you of grief and guilt and self-pity and fill you up with hate and cunning and the spirit of vengeance. I will make my final stand here, Benjamin Thomas Parish.”

— Rick Yancey

68. “Not Cassie for Cassandra. Or Cassie for Cassidy. Cassie for Cassiopeia, the constellation, the queen tied to her chair in the northern sky, who was beautiful but vain, placed in the heavens by the sea god Poseidon as a punishment for her boasting. In Greek, her name means “she whose words excel.”

— Rick Yancey

69. “Fifty yards away. The muzzle velocity of a M16 is 3,100 feet per second. Three feet in a yard, which means he has two-thirds of a second left on Earth.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

72. “There are times when fear is not our enemy. There are times when fear is our truest, sometimes only, friend.”

— Rick Yancey

73. “Cruelty isn’t a personality trait. Cruelty is a habit.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

75. “I start to unbutton his shirt. “Got to get these clothes off,” I mutter. “You don’t know how long I’ve waited to hear you say that.” Smile. Lopsided. Sexy.”

— Rick Yancey

76. “Self-pity is egotism undiluted, after all – self-centeredness in its purest form.”

— Rick Yancey

77. “If I had faced it then, I wouldn’t be facing it now, but sooner or later you have to choose between running and facing the thing you thought you could not face.”

— Rick Yancey

78. “The cold stars spun to the ancient rhythm, the august march of an everlasting symphony. They are old, the stars, and their memory is long.”

— Rick Yancey

79. “She hated him and loved him, longed for him and loathed him, and cursed herself for feeling anything at all.”

— Rick Yancey

80. “The golden light and the dark trees glistening with ice and the way the air smells on cold mornings. The things we leave behind and the things that never leave us. The world ended once. It will end again. The world ends, then the world comes back. The world always comes back.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

82. “Silencer, was as good as any. It described his purpose: to snuff out the human noise.”

— Rick Yancey

83. “No one will remember us, out footprints erased, our legacies wiped out, our children and their children and their children’s children at war against one another unto the last generation, to the end of the world.”

— Rick Yancey

84. “After the first touch, touching becomes too easy.”

— Rick Yancey

85. “You’re safe here. Perfectly safe. That phrase still haunts me. Haunts me because it’s always been a lie. It was a lie before they came and it’s still a lie. 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. Otherwise, you’re just a walking corpse. You’re a zombie.”

— Rick Yancey

86. “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep; the more I give to thee, The more I have; for both are infinite. – William Shakespeare.”

— Rick Yancey

87. “There’s nothing left to say. There’s a million things left to say.”

— Rick Yancey

88. “I am more than the sum of my fear.”

— Rick Yancey

89. “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

90. “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

91. “I don’t move. I wait behind my log, terrified. Over the past ten minutes, it’s become such a dear friend, I consider naming it: Howard, my pet log.”

— Rick Yancey

92. “Human beings are remarkably resilient. When you think about it, our species has been teetering upon the edge of the existential cliff since Hiroshima. In short, we endure.”

— Rick Yancey

93. “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

94. “But that’s all it is, a coincidence. There’s no divine plan. There’s nothing fated in our stars. No meant-to-be in any of it. We are accidental people occupying an accidental planet in an accidental universe. And that’s okay. These.”

— Rick Yancey

95. “And red is not the color of apples or roses or the dresses that pretty girls wear in the summertime. That is not the color of red at all.”

— Rick Yancey

96. “It’s her eyes that get to me. The deep dark of them. Is nothing there – or nearly everything?”

— Rick Yancey

97. “I do not mean to mock or ridicule your life’s work, for in one way at least it mimics my own: We have dedicated our lives to the pursuit of phantoms. The difference is the nature of those phantoms. Mine exist between other men’s ears; yours live solely between your own.”

— Rick Yancey

98. “I would kill for a cheeseburger. Honestly. If I stumbled across someone eating a cheeseburger, I would kill them for it.”

— Rick Yancey

99. “It isn’t about destroying our capability to fight so much as crushing our will to fight.”

— Rick Yancey

100. “In every creepy movie ever made, the barn is the prime nesting ground for the things you don’t know you’re looking for and always regret finding.”

— Rick Yancey