Top 450 Rick Yancey Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

259. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

261. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

263. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

265. “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

266. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

268. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

270. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

272. “Ben was waiting to pounce the minute I went back inside. I knew he was ready to pounce because the minute I went back inside, he pounced.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

274. “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

275. “In her dream, a large owl perches outside the window, staring at her through the glass with huge, white-rimmed eyes.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

277. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

282. “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

283. “Indifference is the ultimate evolutionary achievement.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

285. “Lead on, Vader!”

— Rick Yancey

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

292. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

295. “Perhaps that is our doom, our human curse, to never really know one another.”

— Rick Yancey

296. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

298. “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

299. “When I woke up in you, Cassie. I wasn’t fully human until I saw myself in your eyes.” And then there are real human tears in his real human eyes, and it’s my turn to hold him while his heart breaks. My turn to see myself in his eyes.”

— Rick Yancey

300. “It only takes one. Just one, and the world changes.”

— Rick Yancey