Top 450 Rick Yancey Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

111. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

120. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

123. “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

124. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

127. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

129. “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

130. “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

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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

140. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

142. “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

143. “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

144. “Locura: la nueva normalidad.”

— Rick Yancey

145. “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

146. “Sarcasm doesn’t appear to work on him. If that’s true, I’m in trouble: It’s my normal mode of communication.”

— Rick Yancey

147. “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

148. “Then the door flew open and Mr. Faulks told us to head over to the gym. I thought that was really smart. Get all of us in one place so the aliens didn’t have to waste a lot of ammunition.”

— Rick Yancey

149. “I’m actually very good,” he said matter-of-factly. Even when he says something that, on paper, sounds like bragging, it isn’t. It’s the way he says it, casually, like he’s talking about the weather.”

— Rick Yancey

150. “How easy it was. How incredibly easy, even after all that we’d been through. Or maybe it was easy because of all we’d been through. They gathered us in. They emptied us out. They filled us up with hate and cunning and the spirit of vengeance. So they could send us out again. To kill what’s left of the rest of us.”

— Rick Yancey