Top 450 Rick Yancey Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

207. “There was, like, this black hole where the world used to be, and we were both falling toward it. What could we hold on to?”

— Rick Yancey

208. “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

209. “Just because a man is a homicidal maniac doesn’t make him wrong.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

216. “It’s an alien apocalypse! Quick, grab the beer!”

— Rick Yancey

217. “The world works from the outside in. So if the lights go off, you look outside.”

— Rick Yancey

218. “You can only call someone crazy if there’s someone else who’s normal.”

— Rick Yancey

219. “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

220. “There was not breaking through the lie because accepting the truth would break them.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

222. “Lying was the worst kind of buffoonery.”

— Rick Yancey

223. “But can you still trust love?”

— Rick Yancey

224. “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

225. “People die. Love endures.”

— Rick Yancey

226. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

235. “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

236. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— 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 bent but unbroken ones.”

— Rick Yancey

247. “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

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