Top 450 Rick Yancey Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Yes, my dear child, monsters are real. I happen to have one hanging in my basement.”

— Rick Yancey

52. “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

53. “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

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. “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

56. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

62. “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

63. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

65. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

74. “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

75. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

79. “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

80. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

82. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

84. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

91. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

94. “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

95. “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

96. “He spreads his fingers over my heart, like he’s holding it, like it belongs to him, the hard-fought-for territory he’s won fair and square.”

— Rick Yancey

97. “The world ended once. It will end again. The world ends, then the world comes back. The world always comes back.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

100. “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. Floods, fires, earthquakes, disease, starvation, betrayal, isolation, murder. 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