Top 450 Rick Yancey Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “We are accidental people occupying an accidental planet in an accidental universe.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

153. “Don’t you get it yet? The minute we decide that one person doesn’t matter anymore, they’ve won.”

— Rick Yancey

154. “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 seven billion billion atoms are good with that.”

— Rick Yancey

155. “We are one, you and I. Brothers in hate, brothers in cunning, brothers in the spirit of vengeance.”

— Rick Yancey

156. “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

157. “Maybe you reach a certain point in evolution where boredom is the greatest threat to your survival. Maybe this isn’t a planetary takeover at all, but a game. Like a kid pulling wings off flies.”

— Rick Yancey

158. “Dr. Warthrop chopped off my finger with a butcher knife.”

— Rick Yancey

159. “Even the longest journey is a circle, and history will always cycle back to the place where it began.”

— Rick Yancey

160. “A man lies upon the floor, spreads his arms, and transforms himself into a ship of a thousand sails.”

— Rick Yancey

161. “I am drowning in an infinite sea.”

— Rick Yancey

162. “Indifference is the ultimate evolutionary achievement, the highest rung on nature’s ladder. The.”

— Rick Yancey

163. “The way is dark, the path is not straight. Easy to get lost, if you don’t know the way, easy to go in circles, easy to find yourself at the place from which you began.”

— Rick Yancey

164. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

166. “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

167. “My anger is greater than the sum of all things lost.”

— Rick Yancey

168. “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

169. “No matter how well you know someone, there’s still a part of them you won’t. You can’t. Like, ever. A locked room. I don’t know.”

— Rick Yancey

170. “It’s the ancient instinct: In times of great danger, be wary of strangers. Trust no one outside your circle. But there’s another instinct, far older, as old as life itself, nearly impossible for the human mind to override: Protect the young at all costs. Preserve the future.” – Vosch.”

— Rick Yancey

171. “Until we’ve killed everyone who isn’t tagged.” Another step. Right in front of me now. The end of the gun pressing lightly against her chest. “It’s the 5th Wave, Ben.”

— Rick Yancey

172. “It wasn’t a good fake smile. You could always tell when she was faking, because she didn’t look friendly; she looked like she was going to throw up.”

— Rick Yancey

173. “When that moment comes-and it always come- when you life teeters between getting up and giving up, when you can’t get up and you can’t give up either, here’s what you do... crawl.”

— Rick Yancey

174. “I knew it to the bottom of my soul: You’re going to die. This wasn’t about survival. It was about payback.”

— Rick Yancey

175. “Beyond their immaculate design, the reason sharks rule the ocean is their complete indifference to everything except feeding, procreation, and defending their territory. The shark does not love. It feels no empathy. It trusts nothing. It lives in perfect harmony with its environment because it has no aspirations or desires. And no pity. A shark feels no sorrow, no remorse, hopes for nothing, dreams of nothing, has no illusions about itself or anything beyond itself.”

— Rick Yancey

176. “My first favourite book was Are You My Mother? A picture book about a lost bird. After that my favourites changed almost yearly. I loved everything by Roald Dahl, but my favourite was probably Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. A librarian gave me a first edition of that book, which I treasure.”

— Rick Yancey

177. “This was it, the thing between us, the thing neither of us could put our fingers on, the unbreakable bond between love and fear. Evan’s the love. I am the fear.”

— Rick Yancey

178. “You can feel it deep in your bones because it’s older than your senses: the end of winter, the Earth sliding toward Spring.”

— Rick Yancey

179. “I’m a disease. That’s what I am to you.”

— Rick Yancey

180. “I think that’s the way it is,” he says after a minute. “When you love someone. Something happens to them, and it’s a punch in the heart. Not like a punch in the heart; a real punch in the heart.”

— Rick Yancey

181. “That first inch was the hardest. The longest inch in the universe. The inch that stretched a thousand miles.”

— Rick Yancey

182. “I can’t leave him. I made a promise.” I start to explain it, but I don’t even know how to begin. How do I put it into words? It isn’t possible. It’s like locating the starting point of a circle. Or finding the first link in a silver chain. “I ran one time,” I finally say. “I’m not running again.”

— Rick Yancey

183. “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

184. “He asks me what happened to my leg. I told him I was shot by a shark. He doesn’t react. Doesn’t seem confused or amused or anything. Like getting shot by a shark is a perfectly natural thing in the aftermath of the arrival.”

— Rick Yancey

185. “That’s the flaw in Vosch’s master plan: If you don’t kill all of us all at once, those who remain will not be the weak.”

— Rick Yancey

186. “A child has little defense against the sight of a parent laid low. Parents, like the earth beneath our feet and the sun above our heads, are immutable objects, eternal and reliable. If one should fall, who might vouch the sun itself won’t fall, burning, into the sea?”

— Rick Yancey

187. “And my coordination was pretty good, thanks to the karate lessons. Dance classes have nothing on karate when it comes to developing grace.”

— Rick Yancey

188. “This here? It’s mine.”

— Rick Yancey

189. “For the gazelle, fear of being eaten. For the lion, fear of starvation. Fear is the chain that binds them together.”

— Rick Yancey

190. “Concrete is the omnipresent human signature, our principal artistic medium on the world’s blank canvas: Wherever we went, the Earth slowly disappeared beneath it.”

— Rick Yancey

191. “Even the most sensitive person can get used to even the most insensitive thing.”

— Rick Yancey

192. “We are the clay, and you are Michelangelo. And we will be your masterpiece.”

— Rick Yancey

193. “Alfred,” Merryweather said. “OIPEP is the only organization of its kind in the world, with practically unlimited resources and an intelligence network that spans every country in the planet. We shall do what any powerful, multinational bureaucracy would do in such a crisis. We shall hold a meeting!”

— Rick Yancey

194. “Beautiful is another word we tossed around too casually, slopping it over everything from cars to nail polish until the word collapsed under the weight of all the banality. But the world is beautiful. I hope they never forget that. The world is beautiful.”

— Rick Yancey

195. “Nothing is more painful than the loneliness of being with someone who is never completely there.”

— Rick Yancey

196. “But the most wonderful thing of all, our highest achievement and the one thing for which I pray we will always be remembered, is stuffing wads of polyester into an anatomically incorrect, cartoonish ideal of one of nature’s most fearsome predators for no other reason than to soothe a child.”

— Rick Yancey

197. “This place can’t be heaven, it doesn’t have the right vibe.”

— Rick Yancey

198. “You’re mortal, and only a mortal can afford to be romantic. When we conquered death, we murdered love.”

— Rick Yancey

199. “You are the nest. You are the hatchling. You are the chrysalis. You are the progeny. You are the rot that falls from stars. You may not understand what I mean. You will.”

— Rick Yancey

200. “You belong to them now. Vosch the sculptor, my body the clay, but not my spirit, never my soul. Unconquered. Uncrushed. Uncontained.”

— Rick Yancey