Top 450 Rick Yancey Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

257. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

259. “But can you still trust love?”

— Rick Yancey

260. “He looked at me and smiled reassuringly and said, “Everything is going to be okay,” because that’s what I wanted him to say and it’s what he wanted to say and that’s what you do when the curtain is falling – you give the line that the audience wants to hear.”

— Rick Yancey

261. “Indifference is the ultimate evolutionary achievement.”

— Rick Yancey

262. “When in the morning light I wake, teach me the path of love to take.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

264. “Too much hope?” The side of her mouth twitches. “Maybe that’s our secret weapon.”

— Rick Yancey

265. “Perhaps God waits for us to be empty, so he may fill us with himself.”

— Rick Yancey

266. “She looks beautiful in its light, not angelic-beautiful, more like avenging angel–beautiful.”

— Rick Yancey

267. “Lead on, Vader!”

— Rick Yancey

268. “I built a fortress safe and strong to last a thousand years. A mighty stronghold that crumbles with a kiss.”

— Rick Yancey

269. “They can kill us, even down to the last of us, but they can’t kill – can never kill – what lasts in us.”

— Rick Yancey

270. “I would just have to find a hog, slaughter it, butcher it, cure the meat, then fry it up. Thinking about the bacon – the potential of bacon – gives me hope. Not all is lost if bacon isn’t. Seriously.”

— Rick Yancey

271. “Thinking about the bacon – the potential of bacon – gives me hope. Not all is lost if bacon isn’t.”

— Rick Yancey

272. “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

273. “Those few seconds when you’re awake but empty. You forget where you are. What you are now, what you were before. It’s all breath and heartbeat and blood moving. Like being in your mother’s womb again. The peace of the void.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

275. “The doctor frowned upon drinking and often expressed wonderment at men who willingly made imbeciles of themselves.”

— Rick Yancey

276. “He knew what would come of it. He had always known. Once he found her imprisoned in snow and carried her back and made her whole, his death would be the price. Virtues are vices now, and death is the cost of love. Not the death of his body. His body was the lie. True death. The death of his humanity. The death of his soul.”

— Rick Yancey

277. “It’s just me and the invader inside me and the dead – not just my family, but all the dead, all however-many-billion of them, reaching for me as I run. Reaching. Running. And it occurs to me that there’s no real difference between us, the living and the dead; it’s just a matter of tense: past-dead and future-dead.”

— Rick Yancey

278. “So often the monsters that crowd our minds are nothing more than the strange and thoroughly alien progeny of our own fearful fantasies.”

— Rick Yancey

279. “The answer is they didn’t. They aren’t here, Razor. They never were it’s just us. It’s always been just us.”

— Rick Yancey

280. “Promises are the only currency left. They must be spent wisely.”

— Rick Yancey

281. “But I think he knew in the end it wouldn’t be the lucky ones left standing. It would be the hardcore. The ones who tell Lady Luck to go screw herself. The ones with hearts of stone.”

— Rick Yancey

282. “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

283. “We’re all dead... Some of us are just a little further along than others.”

— Rick Yancey

284. “Give someone the power of the gods and he will become as indifferent as the gods.”

— Rick Yancey

285. “He said it like he assumed I knew what the grandfather paradox was, because, if I didn’t know, then I was a moron. I hate when people do that.”

— Rick Yancey

286. “Pining for things we lost is the same as hoping for things that can never be. Both roads dead-end in despair.”

— Rick Yancey

287. “You can’t be who you say you are because who you say you are could not have done what you did!”

— Rick Yancey

288. “Even the most open person has a private, sacred place where no one else may go.”

— Rick Yancey

289. “Breathe, Cassie, breathe. He has a good face. Not the face of someone who wants to hurt you. If he wanted to hurt you, he wouldn’t have brought you here and stuck an IV in you to keep you hydrated, and the sheets feel nice and clean, and so what took your clothes and dressed you in this cotton nightie, what did you expect him to do? Your clothes were filthy, like you, only you’re not anymore, and your skin smells a little like lilacs, which means holy Christ he BATHED you.”

— Rick Yancey

290. “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

291. “Adolphus is not at his desk. That means he is somewhere in the Monstrumarium, has gone home for the day, or is dead.”

— Rick Yancey

292. “I push the thought away. Promises are priceless, and a kiss is a kind of promise, too.”

— Rick Yancey

293. “Every face he saw was the face of a corpse-to-be. His world was peopled with living ghosts.”

— Rick Yancey

294. “The world was ripping apart. And pieces of the wreckage were raining all around me.”

— Rick Yancey

295. “I don’t know, maybe imminent peril made him feel more alive somehow, for the same reason zombies are carnivores with only one item on the menu. You never heard of undead vegetarians. Where’s the challenge in attacking a plate of asparagus?”

— Rick Yancey

296. “Once a human named Evan Walker had a dream – a dream it can no longer remember – and in that dream there was a tent in the woods and in that tent there was a girl who called herself humanity, and the girl was worth more to it than its own life.”

— Rick Yancey

297. “Turn around. I am there, one ten-thousandth of an inch outside your range of vision. I am always there. I am the faceless thing you cannot name, the nameless thing you cannot face.”

— Rick Yancey

298. “Madness is a wholly human malady borne in a brain too evolved – or not quite evolved enough – to bear the awful burden of its own existence.”

— Rick Yancey

299. “He is there; I feel him, one ten-thousandth of an inch outside my range of vision. I stalk him. He stalks me. The man who wrote these books is not the man who lives in them. That man is the form; Will Henry is the shadow. And now that shadow lives in me. And it lives in you.”

— Rick Yancey

300. “Well, thought I, he’s either sleeping or he’s dead. If the former, I dare not wake him. If the latter, I cannot!”

— Rick Yancey