Top 450 Rick Yancey Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “A thousand ways. Focus on the one way.”

— Rick Yancey

303. “Who cares what she was when what she is now is dead?”

— Rick Yancey

304. “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

305. “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

306. “It’s moments like those that make me want to slap him, not that slapping him would do any good, but it would make me feel better.”

— Rick Yancey

307. “I stare at her. I’ve always known that it’s impossible to argue with Belinda, not because she’s particularly good at it, but because she’s so bad at it- that there is no common ground to work from. She simply sees the world she wants to see it and no amount of logic can change her mind.”

— Rick Yancey

308. “Love may be nothing more than a complex interaction of hormones, conditioned behavior, and positive reinforcement, but try writing a poem or song about that.”

— Rick Yancey

309. “I’ve always thought, if heaven is such a wonderful place, why is entering it so absurdly easy? Confess your sins, ask forgiveness – and that is all? No matter what your crimes?”

— Rick Yancey

310. “It’s their world now, and we’re the aliens.”

— Rick Yancey

311. “The lion crouches in the tall grass. The gazelle sniffs the air. The awful stillness before the strike.”

— Rick Yancey

312. “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

313. “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

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

— Rick Yancey

315. “I’ve always sucked at games of chance. Always hated them for that reason.”

— Rick Yancey

316. “Life is a circle bound by fear. The fear of the predator. The fear of the prey. Without fear, life would not exist.”

— Rick Yancey

317. “You know what you do when you can’t stand up and march, soldier? Vosch asks. You crawl.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

319. “So, I thought, this is how dead people see the world.”

— Rick Yancey

320. “I have one half of one half second to decide.”

— Rick Yancey

321. “Why do we always get the Evan we deserve instead of the Evan we want?”

— Rick Yancey

322. “I don’t know what to say. So I don’t say anything. Too many people say something when they really have nothing to say.”

— Rick Yancey

323. “Forgiveness is not born out of innocence or ignorance. Forgiveness is born of love.”

— Rick Yancey

324. “They say no one knows the Bible better than the devil.”

— Rick Yancey

325. “We call Chess the game of Kings, because through chess, we learn how to rule kings.”

— Rick Yancey

326. “Who wants to read a book when you can blow something up?”

— Rick Yancey

327. “It isn’t fear that will defeat them. Not fear or faith or hope or even love, but rage.”

— Rick Yancey

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

— Rick Yancey

329. “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

330. “But there are thoughts we think in the forward part of our brains, and then there are those whose origins are much deeper, in the animal part, the part that remembers the terrors of the open savanna at night, the oldest part that was there before the primordial voice that spoke the words “I AM.”

— Rick Yancey

331. “This is the sound of the Earth before we conquered it.”

— Rick Yancey

332. “The boy who never sleeps, sleeping. Coming to rest upon the Cassiopeian shore, an island in the middle of a sea of blood. You have your promise, and I have you.”

— Rick Yancey

333. “Books? They’re heavy and take up room in my already bulging backpack. But I have a thing about books.”

— Rick Yancey

334. “In fact, I can’t even tell if I’m breathing. That’s number one on the “How do I know if I’m alive?” checklist.”

— Rick Yancey

335. “He just said don’t ask questions,” Megan whispers. “And then he asks if we have any questions.”

— Rick Yancey

336. “Doesn’t want to leave, doesn’t have an excuse to stay.”

— Rick Yancey

337. “It would be the hardcore. The ones who tell Lady Luck to go screw herself. The ones with hearts of stone. The ones who could let a hundred die so one might live. The ones who see the wisdom in torching a village in order to save it. The world was FUBAR now.”

— Rick Yancey

338. “Her raised his face to the weeping sky, closed his dark eyes, and sighed deeply, a smile playing on his sensuous lips. “The bloody hour is come.”

— Rick Yancey

339. “If you are human, there is no hope.”

— Rick Yancey

340. “So there you go. You can love the good in us and hate the bad, but the bad is in us, too. Without it, we wouldn’t be us.”

— Rick Yancey

341. “I give her my best smile. Before the alien Armageddon happened, I was known for my smile. Not bragging too much, but I had to be careful never to smile while I drove. It had the capacity to blind oncoming traffic. But it has absolutely no effect on Ringer. She doesn’t squint in its overwhelming luminescence. She doesn’t even blink.”

— Rick Yancey

342. “You wanted to create a human without humanity. Now you’re going to get one.”

— Rick Yancey

343. “It was about killing us. All of us.”

— Rick Yancey

344. “I bet you popped out of your momma with a gun in one hand and a doughnut in the other.”

— Rick Yancey

345. “It isn’t up to me to break his heart; that’s time’s job.”

— Rick Yancey

346. “You left her. When she needed you, you ran. And you’re still running. Don’t you think it’s time you stop running and fight for her?”

— Rick Yancey

347. “Remember me... When all else has been forgotten.”

— Rick Yancey

348. “I’d walk right up to him and blow his brains out.”

— Rick Yancey

349. “This is murder, what they’re doing to us. A very slow, very cruel murder, killing us from our souls outward, and I remember the commander’s words: It isn’t about destroying our capability to fight so much as crushing our will to fight.”

— Rick Yancey

350. “I think we’re seriously screwed when the men with guns decided to help the bad guys.”

— Rick Yancey