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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

258. “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

259. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

266. “The only certainty is uncertainty, except your own death, that’s damn certain.”

— Rick Yancey

267. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

269. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “Something takes over when you’re facing death. The front part of your brain lets go, gives up control to the oldest part of you, the part that takes care of your heartbeat and breathing and the blinking of your eyes. The part nature built first to keep your ass alive. The part that stretches time like a gigantic piece of toffee, making a second seem like an hour and a minute longer than a summer afternoon.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

276. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

278. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

281. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

286. “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

287. “Indifference is the ultimate evolutionary achievement.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

289. “Lead on, Vader!”

— Rick Yancey

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

295. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

299. “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

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

— Rick Yancey