Top 450 Rick Yancey Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “And then Evan Walker kisses me.”

— Rick Yancey

402. “The wildest thing about holding my brother’s memories inside me? Seeing myself through his eyes, hearing myself with his ears, sailing the Cassiopeian sea in three dimensions, the way we experience practically everything except the one thing we’re supposed to understand the best: ourselves.”

— Rick Yancey

403. “I was never very good at history, but I was pretty sure douchebags like Hitler didn’t laugh very much.”

— Rick Yancey

404. “I’m afraid we may expect something closer to Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas than a scene from Close Encounters, and we all know how that.”

— Rick Yancey

405. “I’m lost, Zombie.” “I’ll find you.” “I can’t move.” “I’ll carry you.”

— Rick Yancey

406. “If you had twenty minutes to live, what would you do?” “I don’t know,” I answered. “But it wouldn’t have anything to do with you.”

— Rick Yancey

407. “One of those questions you don’t want to know the answer to, but still have to ask.”

— Rick Yancey

408. “He doesn’t want to know; he has to know.”

— Rick Yancey

409. “A word of advice, Will Henry. When a person of the female gender says she wants to show you something, run the other way. The odds are it is not something you wish to see.”

— Rick Yancey

410. “He kept me from dying. Fed me, bathed me, protected me. He helped me to get strong. He even taught me how to kill. With an enemy like that, who needs friends?”

— Rick Yancey

411. “I dab at the blood with some gauze from the kit, fighting back hysterical giggles. I blame it on the unbearable stress, not on the fact that I’m wiping Evan Walker’s ass.”

— Rick Yancey

412. “How oft do they rescue or ruin us, through whimsy or design or a combination of both, the adults to whom we entrust our care!”

— Rick Yancey

413. “If there was any hope left, it lay in love’s hopeless promises.”

— Rick Yancey

414. “A moment comes in war when the last line must be crossed. The line that separates what you hold dear from what total war demands. If he couldn’t cross that line, the battle was over, and he was lost. His heart, the war. Her face, the battlefield.”

— Rick Yancey

415. “Family, Luke. You promised.”

— Rick Yancey

416. “I want my gun back,” she said. “Why do you want your gun back?” “So I can shoot you.” “Then you’re definitely not getting your gun back.”

— Rick Yancey

417. “Who needs a 12th System when you have a heart like Cassie Sullivans’s?”

— Rick Yancey

418. “Better not to remember. Better not to know. You can’t mourn what you never had.”

— Rick Yancey

419. “It took a second for me to understand what he meant. Then another to get that he was serious. A third second to do something about the first two seconds, which was to sit down.”

— Rick Yancey

420. “That’s how it’ll go down. Those will be the last words of the last one left. I am human.”

— Rick Yancey

421. “That was my way of saying I was bored, which you were not allowed to say in front of my mother. If she heard you complain that you were bored, you found yourself with a dust rag in your hand.”

— Rick Yancey

422. “Where the body went, the mind followed. Give someone the power of the gods and he will become as indifferent as the gods.”

— Rick Yancey

423. “Then I strip the pants away from each leg, like peeling a banana. That’s it, the perfect metaphor: peeling a banana.”

— Rick Yancey

424. “How baffling it is that we imagined cities incinerated by alien bombs and death rays when all they really needed was Mother Nature and time.”

— Rick Yancey

425. “Chess wasn’t invented. It was discovered.” “Like America?” “Like mathematics.”

— Rick Yancey

426. “She stays away from his dreams, as if she knows not to go there, because dreams are not real but feel more than real when you’re dreaming them. She loves him too much to do that.”

— Rick Yancey

427. “I will trade my self-pity for hate. My guilt for cunning. My grief for the spirit of vengeance.”

— Rick Yancey

428. “But there’re the things we tell ourselves about the truth, and there’re the things the truth tells about us.”

— Rick Yancey

429. “I haven’t had solid food in weeks, and what does he bring me? Some greasy mystery meat–based broth. He’s been holding out on me, this farm boy bastard.”

— Rick Yancey

430. “The world is screaming.”

— Rick Yancey

431. “Love is the one thing in the universe that’s unpredictable.”

— Rick Yancey

432. “I might have some issues with fear.”

— Rick Yancey

433. “In the beginning there was a war. Before there were men or green fields or the untamed sea. Before there was anything at all, before Time existed, there was a terrible war. A war that these beings you saw today lost. The Archangel Michael, with the Sword mortal men would name Excalibur, cast them down for their transgression against the throne of heaven.”

— Rick Yancey

434. “I’ve decided to trust him, but like somebody once said, you can’t force yourself to trust. So you put all your doubts in a little box and bury it deep and then try to forget where you buried it. My problem is that buried box is like a scab I can’t stop picking at.”

— Rick Yancey

435. “When you’re out of options, the best option is to do nothing. Play dead. The possum option.”

— Rick Yancey

436. “Are pervs only pervs if you don’t find them attractive?”

— Rick Yancey

437. “We often take vengeance long after the fact upon blameless surrogates, reprising the same sins of the ones who trespassed against us, and so perpetuate ad infinitum the pain we suffered at their hands.”

— Rick Yancey

438. “No more absurd or insidious a precept has ever been laid down than “Where there is life, there is hope,” he had averred, and what further proof was required beyond the case of Hezekiah Varner, captain of the doomed Feronia? Life he had, but what hope? His fate was no different from that of the fair virgin thrown into the sacrificial pit of the Oba – nay, it was worse, for that savage feeding frenzy lasted but a few seconds, while the maggots’ endured for weeks.”

— Rick Yancey

439. “His entire chest cavity had been opened up. Ice crystals glittered like jewels festooning his ribs, lining the walls of his ripped-open stomach; his lungs looked like two enormous multifaceted diamonds; his frozen viscera shone as brightly as wet marble. It was terrible. And it was beautiful.”

— Rick Yancey

440. “Because if I am the last one, then I am humanity. And if this is humanity’s last war, then I am the battlefield.”

— Rick Yancey

441. “I thought the only way to hold on was to find something to live for. It isn’t. To hold on, you have to find something you’re willing to die for.”

— Rick Yancey

442. “But you must understand, Will Henry, ‘possibility’ is not ‘probability.’ It is possible the sun will rise in the west on the morrow, but hardly probable.”

— Rick Yancey

443. “Crazy people. They never think they’re crazy. Their craziness makes perfect sense to them.”

— Rick Yancey

444. “Perhaps that is our doom, our human curse, to never really know one another. We erect edifices in our minds about the flimsy framework of word and deed, mere totems of the true person, who, like the gods to whom the temples were built, remains hidden. We understand our own construct; we know our own.”

— Rick Yancey

445. “The doctor was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs, impatiently drumming his fingers upon the rail. Apparently he did not think there was enough “snap” in my “to.”

— Rick Yancey

446. “Show me a man who cannot control his appetites, and I will show a man living under a death sentence.”

— Rick Yancey

447. “A healthy sense of the ironic is the best way to remain sane in a world that often isn’t; I highly recommend it.”

— Rick Yancey

448. “What bound me to him beyond the inertia to which all humans are susceptible.”

— Rick Yancey

449. “His father rejected his entreaties, so he rejected mine, and I – in the strangest twist of all – was him, the isolated and lonesome little boy seeking approbation and acceptance from the one person from whom it mattered most. It offended his pride and doubled his anger: anger at his father for ignoring his need, anger at himself for needing anything in the first place.”

— Rick Yancey

450. “There are some we cannot help but take an instant dislike to.”

— Rick Yancey