Top 450 Rick Yancey Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “He would bear any burden, endure any hardship, suffer any torment if that suffering added a single moment to her life.”

— Rick Yancey

202. “Speaking of fruit, I’m down – I mean, he’s down – to his underwear.”

— Rick Yancey

203. “For some, death is the midwife to faith. For others, it is faith’s executioner.”

— Rick Yancey

204. “I can’t decide if he’s holding me back or holding me up.”

— Rick Yancey

205. “Too many people say something when they really have nothing to say.”

— Rick Yancey

206. “There is beauty that soothes like the warm kiss of the spring sun upon the cheek, and then there is beauty that terrifies, like the cry of Ozymandias, inviting despair.”

— Rick Yancey

207. “Ten thousand years to build civilization, ten months to tear it down, and each day lasted ten times longer than the one before, and the nights lasted ten times as long as the days. The only thing more excruciating than the boredom of those hours was the terror of knowing that any minute they could end.”

— Rick Yancey

208. “You know you’ve reached a very sad place when the only person who can make you laugh is yourself.”

— Rick Yancey

209. “The world is a clock and the clock winds down, and their coming had nothing to do with that. The world has always been a clock. Even the stars will wink out one by one and there will be no light or heat, and this is the war, the endless, futile war against the lightless, heatless void rushing toward us.”

— Rick Yancey

210. “A flawless, self-sustaining loop, an immaculate system in which trust and cooperation can never take root. Progress becomes impossible, for all strangers are potential enemies, the ‘other’ who must be hunted down until the last bullet is spent. You.”

— Rick Yancey

211. “Tears welled in his eyes. It was like watching chocolate melt.”

— Rick Yancey

212. “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

213. “Tampons. I’m constantly worrying about my stash and if I’ll be able to find more.”

— Rick Yancey

214. “In the 4th Wave, you can’t trust that people are still people. But you can trust that your gun is still your gun.”

— Rick Yancey

215. “They’ve flipped the natural order on us, boy. Better to die than live. Better to give up than fight. Better to hide than face. They know the way to break us is to kill us first here.”

— Rick Yancey

216. “The wheat had survived the hail and lightning of the summer storms, but luck could not deliver it from the cold. By the time the refugees took shelter in the old house, the wheat was dead, killed by the hard fist of a deep frost.”

— Rick Yancey

217. “We are the hunters – and we are also the bait.”

— Rick Yancey

218. “It doesn’t feel that short if you’re in it. It feels like a lifetime.”

— Rick Yancey

219. “I’m determined, when the time comes, to at least go out with clean teeth.”

— Rick Yancey

220. “The bent but unbroken ones.”

— Rick Yancey

221. “The dead have their reward... It is the living – you and I – who still have work to do.”

— Rick Yancey

222. “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

223. “The foundation of all life, often obscured, never lost. Joy.”

— Rick Yancey

224. “What are our memories but the ultimate proof that we exist?”

— Rick Yancey

225. “Aliens are stupid.”

— Rick Yancey

226. “A miscalculation is not negligence, nor prudence a crime. I am a scientist. I base my action or inaction upon probability and evidence. There is a reason we call science a discipline! Inferior minds bolt or build pyres to roast the witches in their midst!”

— Rick Yancey

227. “And, for one– ten thousandth of a second, all of it fell away, the despair and grief and anger and pain and hunger, and the old Ben Parish rose from the dead. The eyes that impaled. The smile that slayed. In another moment, he would fade, slide back into the new Ben, the one called Zombie, and I understood something I hadn’t before: He was dead, the object of my schoolgirl desires, just as the schoolgirl who desired him was dead.”

— Rick Yancey

228. “There are things that are too terrible to remember, and there are things that are almost too wonderful to recall.”

— Rick Yancey

229. “Oh, Will Henry. After all we have been through, how could I send you away now, at our most critical hour? You are indispensable to me.”

— Rick Yancey

230. “If you wanted to separate humans from their humanity, I thought, killing laughter would be a good place to start. I was never very good at history, but I was pretty sure douchebags like Hitler didn’t laugh very much.”

— Rick Yancey

231. “In case you’re an alien and you’re reading this: BITE ME.”

— Rick Yancey

232. “In a thousand years, you could hold the entirety of the city in the palm of your hand.”

— Rick Yancey

233. “Easier to believe the beautiful lie than the hideous truth.”

— Rick Yancey

234. “Still, you tend to believe what you always believed, think what you always thought, expect what you always expected.”

— Rick Yancey

235. “Nothing makes us love something more than the loss of it.”

— Rick Yancey

236. “The 12th System can protect you from the pain that afflicts your body, but it’s helpless against the pain that crushes your soul.”

— Rick Yancey

237. “While some people were shooting themselves and hanging themselves and swallowing handfuls of pills and jumping from high places, Dad pushed back against the darkness.”

— Rick Yancey

238. “There are those who labor in the darkness, that the rest of us might live in the light.”

— Rick Yancey

239. “So I do the thing most reasonable people would in my situation. I run.”

— Rick Yancey

240. “Talking about the problem had replaced actually doing something about it.”

— Rick Yancey

241. “First they taught us not to trust them. Then they taught us not to trust each other. Now, they’re teaching us we can’t even trust ourselves.”

— Rick Yancey

242. “There’s a part of me that’s convinced this everlasting war will end when I coax a smile out of that girl.”

— Rick Yancey

243. “Really, science is wonderful, but why does it tend to suck all the joyous mystery from the world?”

— Rick Yancey

244. “I have a very low tolerance for boredom and often think I would have missed out on books entirely if Id grown up in the Internet and video game age. Now I enjoy books for people of all ages, including children.”

— Rick Yancey

245. “Look, I probably shouldn’t tell someone holding a high-powered semiautomatic rifle this, but you’re really starting to get on my nerves.”

— Rick Yancey

246. “The promise feels like a death sentence, a cell door slamming shut, a stone around my neck that’s destined to carry me down.”

— Rick Yancey

247. “The world is screaming. The world is being burned alive.”

— Rick Yancey

248. “We’re so used to electricity, when it’s gone, we don’t know what to do. So we jump up or squeal or start jabbering like idiots. We panic. It’s like someone cut off our oxygen.”

— Rick Yancey

249. “The last star would die, the universe itself would pass away, but they would go on and on.”

— Rick Yancey

250. “I want to crack him in the head and burst into tears at the same time. I’ve reached the point of being tired of being tired.”

— Rick Yancey