Top 450 Rick Yancey Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “The Earth dark and quiet, the way it was before we showed up to fill it with noise and light. Something ends. Something new begins. This was the in-between time. The pause.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

104. “Paimon would never believe the lie I was about to tell. That was the really weird thing about evil. Lying to God was better than lying to the devil: God will forgive you.”

— Rick Yancey

105. “I made a promise. The kind of promise you don’t break because, if you break it you’ve broken part of yourself, maybe the most important part.”

— Rick Yancey

106. “The temperature of true rage is absolute zero, and mine is deeper than the ocean, wider than the universe.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

108. “I am humanity. He crawled. I am humanity. He fell. I am humanity. He got up.”

— Rick Yancey

109. “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

110. “The monstrous act by definition demands a monster.”

— Rick Yancey

111. “Who does this teenage version of the Brawny paper-towel guy think he’s kidding?”

— Rick Yancey

112. “It’s like a cockroach working up a plan to defeat the shoe on its way down to crush it.”

— Rick Yancey

113. “I was woefully ignorant in the social graces. I was being raised, after all, by Pellinore Warthrop.”

— Rick Yancey

114. “Okay. What if we were the last two people on Earth?” “Then you’d still end up being the last, because I’d kill myself.”

— Rick Yancey

115. “Why did they come billions of miles just to stare at us? It’s rude.”

— Rick Yancey

116. “If the world breaks a million and one promises, can you trust the million and second?”

— Rick Yancey

117. “There’s a quote from Stalin,” he says. “‘A single death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.’ Can you imagine seven billion of anything? I have trouble doing it. It pushes the limits of our ability to comprehend. And that’s exactly why they did it. Like running up the score in football. You played football, right? It isn’t about destroying our capability to fight so much as crushing our will to fight.”

— Rick Yancey

118. “His heart, the war. Her face, the battlefield.”

— Rick Yancey

119. “That’s the cost. That’s the price. Get ready, because when you crush the humanity out of humans, you’re left with humans with no humanity.”

— Rick Yancey

120. “Memories can bring comfort to the old and infirm, but memories can also be implacable foes, a malicious army of temporal ghosts forever pillaging the long-sought-after peace of our twilight years.”

— Rick Yancey

121. “Empty the vessel of hope and faith and trust and you can fill it with anything you like. They.”

— Rick Yancey

122. “The harder survival becomes, the more you want to pull together. And the more you want to pull together, the harder survival becomes.”

— Rick Yancey

123. “Thinking too much has been my problem for a very long time.”

— Rick Yancey

124. “Is this how humanity waves good-bye? Hell no.”

— Rick Yancey

125. “Still I considered the M16 my bestest of besties. Always by my side, even at night, burrowed into my sleeping bag with me, faithful and true. In the 4th Wave, you can’t trust that people are still people. But you can trust that your gun is still your gun. Shhh, Cassie. It’s close. Close.”

— Rick Yancey

126. “It wasn’t aliens that first made us gear up for war; it was our fellow humans.”

— Rick Yancey

127. “Well, this is a tragic love story, isn’t it? Alien invader falls for human girl. The hunter for his prey.”

— Rick Yancey

128. “Because promises matter. They matter now more than ever.”

— Rick Yancey

129. “Do you know how to tell who the enemy is, Cassie?”

— Rick Yancey

130. “It’s always been this way... We bear the unbearable. We endure the unendurable. We do what must be done until we ourselves are undone.”

— Rick Yancey

131. “And, in the end, we lie awake And we dream of making our escape.”

— Rick Yancey

132. “I didn’t show up here to give your life purpose now that your life’s over. That’s up to you to figure out.”

— Rick Yancey

133. “I couldn’t outrun them. I couldn’t outgun them. Maybe I could outsmart them.”

— Rick Yancey

134. “Love is forever. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be love. The world is beautiful. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be the world.”

— Rick Yancey

135. “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

136. “I might have kissed her here,” said Pellinore Warthrop to himself – the fugitive, the prisoner. “I do not remember.”

— Rick Yancey

137. “She was the last star, burning bright in a sea of limitless black.”

— Rick Yancey

138. “Somebody in the back of the room squealed. Classic. It doesn’t matter what time of day it happens – the power goes out, and somebody yelps like the building’s collapsing.”

— Rick Yancey

139. “And in more than half the pictures, she isn’t looking at the camera; she’s looking at him. Not the way I would look at Ben Parish, all squishy around the eyes. She looks at Evan fiercely, like, This here? It’s mine.”

— Rick Yancey

140. “Because, in the end, without love all our effort is wasted, all we do is in vain.”

— Rick Yancey

141. “We are accidental people occupying an accidental planet in an accidental universe.”

— Rick Yancey

142. “But monsters, I now know, come in all shapes and sizes, and only their appetite for human flesh defines them.”

— Rick Yancey

143. “Locura: la nueva normalidad.”

— Rick Yancey

144. “Funny; people die in clumps too.”

— Rick Yancey

145. “Great sci-fi has never shied from tackling the Big Questions, though really great sci-fi never forgets to entertain us along the way. Shock and awe applies to art, as well.”

— Rick Yancey

146. “I don’t make the weather. You got a beef, take it up with God.” That’s what I’ve been doing a lot lately: taking it up with God. Like: God, WTF?”

— Rick Yancey

147. “Because here’s the thing: seeing yourself through another’s eyes shifts your center of gravity. It doesn’t change the way you look at yourself. It changes the way you look at the world. Not the you. The everything-but-you.”

— Rick Yancey

148. “Prayers and promises. The one his sister made to him. The unspoken one I made to my sister. Prayers are promises, too, and these are the days of broken promises.”

— Rick Yancey

149. “To truly pass, you must overcome what cannot be overcome.”

— Rick Yancey

150. “The next thing you do when the plug’s pulled, after panicking, is run to the nearest window. You don’t know why exactly. It’s that better-see-what’s-going-on feeling. The world works from the outside in. So if the lights go off, you look outside.”

— Rick Yancey