Top 450 Rick Yancey Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “People die. Love endures.”

— Rick Yancey

202. “We are very much like them: indiscriminate killers, ruled by drives little acknowledged and less understood, mindlessly territorial and murderously jealous – the only significant difference being that they have yet to master our expertise in hypocrisy, the gift of our superior intellect that enables us to slaughter one another in droves, more often than not under the auspices of an approving god!”

— Rick Yancey

203. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

207. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

223. “The bent but unbroken ones.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

225. “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

226. “The experience was like running into someone you hadn’t seen since middle school – you recognize them, but what you really notice is the ways they’ve changed. They don’t match your memory of how they should look and for a second you’re thrown off, because your memory of them IS them.”

— Rick Yancey

227. “I was a slave to something he believed to be silly and superstitious: the idea that all life was worth defending and that nothing justified surrender to the forces of destruction.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

231. “For the boy on the bridge. And for all the boys for a hundred generations who drop their lines into the swift dark water to catch the leviathans lurking in the deep: These are the secrets.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

233. “But can you still trust love?”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

239. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

243. “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

244. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

250. “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