Top 450 Rick Yancey Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “I thought of the unblemished thing, the thing that lasts, and I thought the only thing with the power to save us also had the power to slay us.”

— Rick Yancey

202. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

208. “Aliens are stupid.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

217. “I am the one, Not Running, Not Staying, But FACING.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

219. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

228. “The bent but unbroken ones.”

— Rick Yancey

229. “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

230. “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

231. “People die. Love endures.”

— Rick Yancey

232. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

235. “Five men and two women, strangers to one another on the eve of that final growing season, now bound by the unspoken promise that the least of them was greater than the sum of all of them.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

238. “It is hard... to think about those things we do not think about.”

— 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. “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

241. “But can you still trust love?”

— Rick Yancey

242. “He barely knew I existed. I knew some of the same people he knew, but I was a girl in the background, several degrees of seperation removed.”

— Rick Yancey

243. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

245. “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

246. “With the right training, there are few things more savage than a ten-year-old.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

248. “The night wears on; the fire dwindles; the wind shifts and my heart aches with nostalgia – summer camps and catching lightning bugs and August skies aflame with stars. The way the desert smells and the long, wistful sigh of wind rushing down from the mountains as the sun dips beneath the horizon.”

— Rick Yancey

249. “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

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

— Rick Yancey