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clinging to modesty in the age of the Others is like sacrificing a goat to make it rain. -- Rick Yancey
I'm a little panicky when I realize he's not here. It's a lot easier to push down my doubt when he's with me. When I can see those eyes the color of melted chocolate and hear his deep voice that falls over me like a warm blanket on a cold night. -- Rick Yancey
I was the girl in the background, the just-friend, or - worse - the friend of a just-friend, the you-sit-next-to-her-in-geometry-but-can't-remember-her-name girl. It would have been better if some middle-aged collector of Star Wars action figures had found me in that snowbank. -- Rick Yancey
How do you rid the Earth of humans? Rid the humans of their humanity. -- Rick Yancey
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
We never see ourselves the way we truly are, do we, Will? The mirror lies to us. -- Rick Yancey
He looks like Darth Vader sounds like him too
Right and he member what happens he turns into a good guy at the end.
Only after he blows up a whole planet and kills a lot of people. -- Rick Yancey
Do you know why our race is doomed, Pellinore? Because it has fallen in love with the pleasant fiction that we are somehow above the very rules that we have determined govern everything else. -- Rick Yancey
In the early days, it was nearly omnipresent, a constant background noise, like the hum of traffic on a busy highway: the sound of a human being in pain. -- Rick Yancey
More than the sum of our experiences, our memories are the ultimate proof of reality. -- Rick Yancey
Like somebody once said, you can't force yourself to trust. so you put all your doubts in a little box and then try to forget where you buried it. -Cassie -- Rick Yancey
It is exceedingly odd to see a piece of yourself apart from yourself. -- Rick Yancey
A child has little defense against the sight of a parent laid low. Parents, like the earth beneath our feet and the sun above our heads, are immutable objects, eternal and reliable. If one should fall, who might vouch the sun itself won't fall, burning, into the sea? -- Rick Yancey
Because love is the most dangerous weapon in the world. It's more unstable than uranium. -- Rick Yancey
It's what we're made for. It's what got us here. It's the reason I have this car to hide under. We are human. And humans thin. They plan. They dream, and they make the dream real. -- Rick Yancey
I'd walk right up to him and blow his brains out. -- Rick Yancey
Afterward I told his widow, "Your husband is dead, but at least he died laughing.' I think she took some comfort in that. It is the second-best way to die, Will Henry." He did not say what the best way was. -- Rick Yancey
Ten thousand years to plan the eradication of humans from Earth and this is the best they can come up with? That's -- Rick Yancey
When I wake up the next morning, there's a Hershey's Kiss sitting on the table beside me. -- Rick Yancey
Do you know what happened to Teacup?"
"Ran away with the spoon, what I heard. -- Rick Yancey
Alfred," Merryweather said. "OIPEP is the only organization of its kind in the world, with practically unlimited resources and an intelligence network that spans every country in the planet. We shall do what any powerful, multinational bureaucracy would do in such a crisis. We shall hold a meeting! -- Rick Yancey
He drops into the room, landing on the balls of his feet like a cat. I'm in his arms in the time it takes to say 'I love you,' which he does, stroking my hair, whispering my name and the words, 'My mayfly. -- Rick Yancey
I took one look at it and demanded that he name three things he isn't good at.
"Roller skating, singing, and talking to girls."
"You left out stalking," I told him as he helped me out of the bed. "I can always tell when you're lurking around corners."
"You only asked for three. -- Rick Yancey
That night lasted a thousand years. -- Rick Yancey
A Silencer wouldn't nurse me back to health - much less give me nicknames and play snuggles in the dark. -- Rick Yancey
Even the most sensitive person can get used to even the most insensitive thing. -- Rick Yancey
I'm just like you. I'm scared and I'm angry and I'm confused and I don't know what the hell I'm going to do, but I do know you can't have it both ways. You can't say you're a human in one breath and a cockroach in the next. -- Rick Yancey
There's nothing fated in our stars. No meant-to-be in any of it. We are accidental people occupying an accidental planet in an accidental universe. And that's okay. These seven billion billion atoms are good with that. -- Rick Yancey
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
He had noticed my bandaged hand.
"An accident," Warthrop said tersely.
"Dr. Warthrop chopped off my finger with a butcher knife."
Von Helrung's brow knotted up in confusion. "By accident?"
"No," I answered. "That part was on purpose. -- Rick Yancey
Love is forever. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be love. The world is beautiful. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be the world. -- Rick Yancey
Cassie," Sam said in my ear. "Your nose is really big."
"That's because it's broken." Like my heart, kid. It's a set. -- Rick Yancey
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
I do not mean to mock or ridicule your life's work, for in one way at least it mimics my own: We have dedicated our lives to the pursuit of phantoms. The difference is the nature of those phantoms. Mine exist between other men's ears; yours live solely between your own. -- Rick Yancey
You can only call someone crazy if there's someone else who's normal. Like good and evil. If everything was good, then nothing would be good. -- Rick Yancey
If I had faced it then, I wouldn't be facing it now, but sooner or later you have to choose between running and facing the thing you thought you could not face. -- Rick Yancey
She hated him and loved him, longed for him and loathed him, and cursed herself for feeling anything at all -- Rick Yancey
the look we give back to death when death looks at us. -- Rick Yancey
Love has a way of making us stupid, Will Henry. It blinds us to certain blatant realities, in this case the spectacularly high mortality rate among monstrumologists. Rarely do we live past forty - my father and von Helrung being the exceptions. -- Rick Yancey
I confessed I did not have an opinion; I was only thirteen, and this was my very first dismemberment. -- Rick Yancey
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
With the right training, there are few things more savage than a ten-year-old. -- Rick Yancey
He had crossed the threshold into that room, where a single promise threw a thousand bolts: I'll find you. That promise, like all promises, created its own morality. To keep it, he would have to cross a sea of blood.
The world unloosed. The planets bound. -- Rick Yancey
You have good instincts,trust them. Thinking through every step is fine if you're playing chess, but this isn't chess. -- Rick Yancey
You know how it is Al- we got no choice when it comes to parents and some of them are woefully underqualified. -- Rick Yancey
Pain is necessary. Pain is life. Without pain there can be no joy. -- Rick Yancey
I can't leave him. I made a promise." I start to explain it, but I don't even know how to begin. How do I put it into words? It isn't possible. It's like locating the starting point of a circle. Or finding the first link in a silver chain. "I ran one time," I finally say. "I'm not running again. -- Rick Yancey
Wait a minute," he says, holding up one of his large handa. "A green bomb?"
"I'm not making this up."
"Why green, though?"
"Because green is the color of money, grass, oak leaves, and alien bombs. How the hell would I know why it was green? -- Rick Yancey
We - can't go back in time and change anything. If you went back in time and killed your grandfather before you were born, then you wouldn't be able to go back in time to kill your grandfather. -- Rick Yancey
Some things, down to the smallest of things, are worth the sum of all things. -- Rick Yancey
That's a lot of Bens to hold in your head at once. I should give them different names to keep them straight: Ben, Has-Ben, and What-Might-Have-
Ben. -- Rick Yancey
And humans think. They plan. They dream, and then they make the dream real. -- Rick Yancey
In her dream, a large owl perches outside the window, staring at her through the glass with huge, white-rimmed eyes. -- Rick Yancey
One of the joys of a really good book is that you're so into the world of the book, you forget what you're looking at is words on a page. -- Rick Yancey
Somentimes you're in the wrong place at the wrong time and what happens is nobody's fault.You just want to feel bad so you'll feel better. -- Rick Yancey
The promise feels like a death sentence, a cell door slamming shut, a stone around my neck that's destined to carry me down -- Rick Yancey
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
We're here, and then we're gone, and it's not about the time we're here, but what we do with the time. -- Rick Yancey
The monstrumologist closed his eyes. "You should not have come, Will Henry."
And I answered, "You should not have left me, Dr. Warthrop. -- Rick Yancey
He knocks once against the side. I don't get it at first, and then I laugh.
Let's establish a code for when you want to go all creeper on me. One knock means you'd like to come in.
"Yes, Evan." I'm laughing so hard, it's starting to hurt. "You can come in. -- Rick Yancey
And red is not the color of apples or roses or the dresses that pretty girls wear in the summertime.
That is not the color of red at all. -- Rick Yancey
There's no bottom to this crap. The more you dig, the further down it goes. -- Rick Yancey
Because promises matter. They matter now more than ever. -- Rick Yancey
...angry at the world for being what the world was, for what it had always been: a dangerous place that our human noise had made seem a whole lot safer. -- Rick Yancey
There are those who labor in the darkness, that the rest of us might live in the light. -- Rick Yancey
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
We are accidental people occupying an accidental planet in an accidental universe. -- Rick Yancey
You can't be who you say you are because who you say you are could not have done what you did! -- Rick Yancey
The kind of eyes you search to find something and only come up with two possibilities: either what's there is so deep you can't see it, or there's nothing there at all. -- Rick Yancey
Miss Marks, you see, makes her living by ... entertaining young, and not so young, sailors ... or any other members of the armed forced, or civilians, who enjoy ... being entertained by ladies who ... entertain. -- Rick Yancey
I push the thought away. Promises are priceless, and a kiss is a kind of promise, too. -- Rick Yancey
If your job is to kill us, why didn't you kill me?" I ask.
He answers without hesitating, as if he's decided long before I asked the question what his answer would be.
"Because I'm in love with you. -- Rick Yancey
And if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. -- Rick Yancey
Dad the launching pad. Dad the landing zone. Dad the tether that kept Sams - and me - from hurtling into the nullity of deep space, a nullity himself now. -- Rick Yancey
Well, this is a tragic love story, isn't it? Alien invader falls for human girl. The hunter for his prey. -- Rick Yancey
Still I considered the M16 my bestest of besties. Always by my side, even at night, burrowed into my sleeping bag with me, faithful and true. In the 4th Wave, you can't trust that people are still people. But you can trust that your gun is still your gun.
Shhh, Cassie. It's close.
Close -- Rick Yancey
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
Floods, fires, earthquakes, disease, starvation, betrayal, isolation, murder.
What doesn't kill us sharpens us. Hardens us. Schools us. -- Rick Yancey
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
You called her a Stork
No you did
What did you call her
A Katerina
Why?
That was her name -- Rick Yancey
This here? It's mine. -- Rick Yancey
Then the door flew open and Mr. Faulks told us to head over to the gym. I thought that was really smart. Get all of us in one place so the aliens didn't have to waste a lot of ammunition. -- Rick Yancey
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
Being born at the tag-end of the baby boom, I was destined (or doomed, depending on how you look at it) to fall in love with sci-fi. It was one of my first literary loves, as a matter of fact. -- Rick Yancey
Dad would fix this. Because that's what dads do. They fix things. -- Rick Yancey
Private Zombie is Squad Fifty-three's very own catcher in the fucking rye. Private Zombie, I think I have a crush on you. You make me weak in the knees. You make me hate my own mother for giving birth to a male child, so now it's impossible for me to have your babies. -- Rick Yancey
Ultimately, Bob is on nobody's side but Bob's. -- Rick Yancey
Not Cassie for Cassandra. Or Cassie for Cassidy. Cassie for Cassiopeia, the constellation, the queen tied to her chair in the northern sky, who was beautiful but vain, placed in the heavens by the sea god Poseidon as a punishment for her boasting. In Greek, her name means she whose words excel. -- Rick Yancey
You will never understand." "You may be right. But it is my human imperative to try. -- Rick Yancey
How would you rather die?" she snapped. "Hiding under your bed or riding Thunder Mountain? -- Rick Yancey
Crying is always easier in the dark. -- Rick Yancey
And my coordination was pretty good, thanks to the karate lessons. Dance classes have nothing on karate when it comes to developing grace. -- Rick Yancey
Humans are social animals. They cluster like bees. -- Rick Yancey
Concrete is the omnipresent human signature, our principal artistic medium on the world's blank canvas: Wherever we went, the Earth slowly disappeared beneath it. -- Rick Yancey
Without faith, no faith without hope, no love without trust, no trust without love. Remove one and the entire human house of cards collapses. -- Rick Yancey
No hope without faith, no faith without hope, no love without trust, no trust without love. Remove one and the entire human house cards collapses. -- Rick Yancey
Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, you fucking alien motherfucker. -- Rick Yancey
That's the cost. That's the price. Get ready, because when you crush the humanity out of humans, you're left with humans with no humanity.
In other words, you get what you pay for, motherfucker -- Rick Yancey
More important by far is that one be honest with oneself. I have always been, and it has cost me dearly. Nothing matters but the truth. I have dedicated my life to the pursuit of it, no matter where it hides. That is the heart of science, Will Henry, the true monster we pursue. -- Rick Yancey
The lion crouches in the tall grass. The gazelle sniffs the air. The awful stillness before the strike. -- Rick Yancey
I give her back an honest-to-goodness smile, the old Ben Parish smile, the one that got me practically everything I wanted. Well, not practically; I'm being modest. -- Rick Yancey
Let no one despair,
even though in the darkest night
the last star of hope my disappear.
Friedrich Schiller -- Rick Yancey
You never know when the truth will come home. You can't choose the time. The time chooses you. -- Rick Yancey
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
They've flipped the natural order on us, boy. Better to die than live. Better to give up than fight. Better to hide than face. They know the way to break us is to kill us first here. -- Rick Yancey
I got a very late start at fatherhood. I'm a late bloomer in general. It took me seven years to get through four years of college. I was five years away from 40 before I had a family, and I had never been around kids much at all. All of a sudden, I was around three boys all the time. -- Rick Yancey
This is the first rule of the last war:Trust No One -- Rick Yancey
,because if a girl loans you a highlighter she must think you're hot -- Rick Yancey
We're all dead ... Some of us are just a little further along than others. -- Rick Yancey
He lost a finger. A finger! Why, I once had a Sherpa who guided me across the Himalayas with his small intestines hanging out of his gut
in winter! -- Rick Yancey
We are humanity, the banner read. Wrong. We're pale reflections of it, weak shadows, distant echoes. -- Rick Yancey
Ever since I was young, 14 or 15, I wondered if you could write a book that combined the visceral thrill of watching a movie with the total immersion you feel when you're inside a good book. And I had some success as a screenwriter before I began writing books. -- Rick Yancey
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
He leans forward and kisses me hard on the mouth.
"Don't ever do that again," I tell him.
"Why? Because you liked it or because you didn't?"
"Both. -- Rick Yancey
You are the nest. You are the hatchling. You are the chrysalis. You are the progeny. You are the rot that falls from stars. You may not understand what I mean.
You will. -- Rick Yancey
You are the human clay," Vosch whispers fiercely in my ear. "And I am Michelangelo. I am the master builder, and you will be my masterpiece. -- Rick Yancey
Choosing between your kind and another species wasn't cruel. It was necessary. -- Rick Yancey
Somebody in the back of the room squealed. Classic. It doesn't matter what time of day it happens - the power goes out, and somebody yelps like the building's collapsing. -- Rick Yancey
When the power goes out, we jump up to ... To what? It's weird. 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
No wings. No markings. And did you see that first pass? Mach 2 at least. Unless we've launched some kind of classified aircraft, no way this thing is terrestrial." As he spoke, Hutchfield was popping his fist up and down in the dirt, beating out a rhythm to match the words. -- Rick Yancey
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
Memories can bring comfort to the old and infirm, but memories can also be implacable foes, a malicious army of temporal ghosts forever pillaging the long-sought-after peace of our twilight years. -- Rick Yancey
Life is full of little ironies, but it's also pockmarked with some the size of that big rock in Australia. -- Rick Yancey
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
Good God, man, what is that smell?" He eyed with disgust the doctor's filthy cloak.
"Life," answered the doctor. -- Rick Yancey
I looked past him, to the sea framed in the arched opening of the wall, to the line formed where the water met the sky. The world was not round, I realized. The world was a plate.
'Please,' he whispered. 'Don't.'
Unlike Rurick, Plesec did not die confused. -- Rick Yancey
I am like the water that runs over me, immune to permanence, recycling endlessly. I am water; I am life. The form may change, but the substance stays the same. Strike me down and I will rise again. Vincit qui patitur. -- Rick Yancey
Funny; people die in clumps too. -- Rick Yancey
Cassie is Nugget's silver locket. -- Rick Yancey
Thinking too much has been my problem for a very long time. -- Rick Yancey
Thinking about the bacon - the potential of bacon - gives me hope. Not all is lost if bacon isn't. -- Rick Yancey
I've always wanted to write science fiction. It was one of my first loves, and I knew if I became a writer someday I'd probably write something in the science fiction vein, but I hesitated for a long while because it's such well-trod ground. -- Rick Yancey
I mean, what if they're us from the future?"
"And it's like The Terminator, right?" I said, rolling my eyes.
"They've come to stop the uprising of the machines. Or maybe they are the machines. Maybe it's Skynet. -- Rick Yancey
My first favourite book was 'Are You My Mother?' A picture book about a lost bird. After that my favourites changed almost yearly. I loved everything by Roald Dahl, but my favourite was probably 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.' A librarian gave me a first edition of that book, which I treasure. -- Rick Yancey
My foray into young adult lit was by no means planned. I wrote the first 'Alfred Kropp' book as an adult novel, which everyone loved but no one would publish - until I changed my protagonist from a thirty-something P.I. into a 15-year-old kid. After that, it was off to the races, and I am so glad. -- Rick Yancey
She was the last star, burning bright in a sea of limitless black. -- Rick Yancey
I'm hoping to pass for one of Vosch's tween recruits, but I probably look more like GI Joe's little sister playing dress up -- Rick Yancey
It doesn't feel that short if you're in it. It feels like a lifetime. -- Rick Yancey
Hello, Earth.
So this is how God sees you, sparkling blue against the dullest black. No wonder he made you. No wonder he made the sun and the stars so he could see you. -- Rick Yancey
The one sure way of not being alone was wanting to be alone. -- Rick Yancey
Snap to, Will Henry! -- Rick Yancey
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
What is life without death, Beneficent? You of all people can answer that question. A never-ending orgy of emptiness that you stuff with meaningless activity. Everything is disposable, including your relationships
especially your your relationships. -- Rick Yancey
Guns might not kill people, but they sure made it easier. -- Rick Yancey
No matter how well you know someone, there's still a part of them you won't. You can't. Like, ever. A locked room. I don't know. -- Rick Yancey
Beside me the monstrumologist murmured, I believe I am in hell, therefore I am there. -- Rick Yancey
'Tax Collector' was optioned for a series with F/X, but it never happened. I guess they ran into a problem trying to figure out why someone would tune in to watch a show about a guy who works for the IRS. -- Rick Yancey
We got it all wrong, there was no alien swarm descending from the sky in their flying saucers or big metal walkers like something out of Star Wars or cute little wrinkly E.T.s who just wanted to pluck a couple of leaves, eat some Reese's Pieces, and go home. That's not how it ends. -- Rick Yancey
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
And I open to him, a flower to the rain. -- Rick Yancey
Maybe you're forgetting who saved your life," Ringer said.
"Oh, kiss my ass. -- Rick Yancey
My nose is broken," I said. Damn that Dumbo. Made me self-conscious.
"My ankle's broken," he said.
"Then I'll come to you. -- Rick Yancey
The world will burn for years. It will burn until I'm my father's age - if I live that long. -- Rick Yancey
He would bear any burden, endure any hardship, suffer any torment if that suffering added a single moment to her life. -- Rick Yancey
My heart ached for the snow. -- Rick Yancey
Well, what do we have here? What have they sent us from central casting - is this a hobbit? Are you a magical creature from a storybook realm come to enchant me with your dark magic? -- Rick Yancey
That's the flaw in Vosch's master plan: If you don't kill all of us all at once, those who remain will not be the weak. -- Rick Yancey
I'm not bitching."
"Yes, you are. You're bitching like a junior miss beauty queen. -- Rick Yancey
We are the hunters---and we are also the bait. -- Rick Yancey
What doesn't kill us sharpens us. Hardens us. Schools us. You're beating plowshares into swords, Vosch. You are remaking us. We are the clay, and you are Michelangelo. And we will be your masterpiece. -- Rick Yancey
And if humanity is the last war, then I am the battlefield. -- Rick Yancey
You don't run from the people who need you. You fight for them. You fight beside them. No matter the cost. No matter the risk. -- Rick Yancey
I could feel the tug of morbid curiosity, like an outgoing tide pulling on a swimmer, urging me to look again. I -- Rick Yancey
Oh, Bob. Gonna miss you. Gonna miss you so bad. -- Rick Yancey
reeking of sewage and rotting corpses, burned-out shells of houses, feral dogs -- Rick Yancey
You never lose those who love you because love is a constant. Love endures. -- Rick Yancey
Private Zombie, you have two seconds, exactly two seconds, to seal that sewer pipe posing as a mouth, -- Rick Yancey
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
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
Oh my son! My son!" von Helrung cried. Now it was his turn to crush my master to his chest. "William! Your father has come for you!"
"I hope not! My father has been dead over fifteen years, von Helrun. -- Rick Yancey
It's almost dawn. You can feel it coming. The world holds its breath, because there's really no guarantee that the sun will rise. That there was a yesterday doesn't mean there will be a tomorrow. -- Rick Yancey
You haven't heard a damn word I've said. See, this is why I can't stand your kinds. You light your candles and mumble your latin spells and pray to a god who isn't there, doesn't care, or is just plain crazy or cruel or both. The world burns and you praise the asshole who either set it or let it. -- Rick Yancey
To truly pass, you must overcome what cannot be overcome. -- Rick Yancey
I didn't know until then that rage had a taste and it tasted like your own blood. -- Rick Yancey
Did he fight?"
"Yes, Sam. He fought very hard. He saved my life."
"But you hid"
"Yes." Crushing Bear against my stomach.
"Like a big fat chicken."
"Not like that," I whispered. "It wasn't like that. -- Rick Yancey
Could there be irony crueler than this? How, upon his rescue, the truth had brought him here, to a house for the mad, for only a madman believes what every child knows to be true: There are monsters that lie in wait under our beds. -- Rick Yancey
By killing us, they showed us the idiocy of stuff. The guy who owned this BMW? He's in the same place as the woman who owned that Kia. -- Rick Yancey
We'd stared into the face of Death, and Death blinked first. You'd think that would make us feel brave and invincible. It didn't. -- Rick Yancey
I want him to touch me again. I want to feel his hands, as soft as clouds. But I'm afraid if he touches me, all seven billion billion billion atoms that make up my body will blow apart and scatter across the universe. -- Rick Yancey
Stay calm. It's like chess. Move and countermove. -- Rick Yancey
I made a promise. The kind of promise you don't break because, if you break it you've broken part of yourself, maybe the most important part. -- Rick Yancey
There's my gut instinct: Don't rush. Don't force the issue. Let it play out. -- Rick Yancey
I am a shark, Cassie," he says slowly, drawing the words out, as if he might be speaking to me for the last time. Looking into my eyes with tears in his, as if he's seeing me for the last time. "A shark who dreamed he was a man. -- Rick Yancey
We are mere part of a grand whoe, in no way superior, not at all the angels in mortal attire we pretend to be. -- Rick Yancey
So, I thought, this is how dead people see the world. -- Rick Yancey
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
For the gazelle, fear of being eaten. For the lion, fear of starvation. Fear is the chain that binds them together. -- Rick Yancey
There is nothing left when you reach the center of everything, just the pit of bones inside the innermost circle. -- Rick Yancey
Are you okay?" I (Cassie) call up to him.
"Um. Define okay." (Ben)
"Okay means you're not bleeding to death."
"I'm okay. -- Rick Yancey
I think that's the way it is," he says after a minute. "When you love someone. Something happens to them, and it's a punch in the heart. Not like a punch in the heart; a real punch in the heart." He shrugs and laughs softly to himself. "Anyway, that's what I felt. -- Rick Yancey
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
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
She rises on her toes and kisses his cheek. "You know what I'm gonna say now."
Zombie smiles. "He'll be fine, Cassie." He grabs her hand and squeezes hard. "With my life."
Her response is immediate and fierce. "Not with your life, Parish. With your death. -- Rick Yancey
The only certainty is uncertainty, except your own death, that's damn certain. -- Rick Yancey
Chess wasn't invented. It was discovered." "Like America?" "Like mathematics. -- Rick Yancey
Being a disgusting, disease-carrying bug with a brain the size of a pinhead isn't something you deal with easily. It takes time to adjust to the idea. -- Rick Yancey
It is wondrous, Will Henry," breathed the monstrumologist over the maddening hum of the flies. "I feared we might be wrong-that Socotra was not the *locus ex magnificum*. But we have found it, haven't we? And is it not wondrous?"
I agreed with him. It was wondrous. -- Rick Yancey
My life is a catalog of the undone and the never-will-be-done. The -- Rick Yancey
It is hard ... to think about those things we do not think about. -- Rick Yancey
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
It isn't that the lies are too beautiful to resist. It's that the truth is too hideous to face. -- Rick Yancey
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
Great sci-fi has never shied from tackling the Big Questions, though really great sci-fi never forgets to entertain us along the way. Shock and awe applies to art, as well. -- Rick Yancey
As long as you draw breath anywhere -here or ten thousands miles from here- I will love you. I can't help loving you, so I choose to hate you ... to make my love bearable. -- Rick Yancey
I am a philosopher in the natural sciences. Matters of the heart I leave to the poets, but it has occurred to me, as a failed poet myself, that the cruelest aspect of love is its inviolable integrity. We do not choose to love - or I should say, we cannot choose not to love. Do you understand? -- Rick Yancey
Nobody knew what to do. We figured the government sort of did. The government had a plan for everything, so we assumed they had a plan for E.T. showing up uninvited and unannounced, like the weird cousin nobody in the family likes to talk about. -- Rick Yancey
Because, in the end, without love all our effort is wasted, all we do is in vain. -- Rick Yancey
Waited for sleep, that gentle mockery of death, to take me. I longed for its effacing grace. But its peace eluded me, and I rose from the bed, my head pounding from the salty torrent of my tears and the ache deep in my stomach. -- Rick Yancey
Ringer, I don't want to burst your bubble, but - "
"You don't want to burst my bubble butt?"
"That sounded suspiciously like a joke. -- Rick Yancey
Is this how humanity waves good-bye?
Hell no. -- Rick Yancey
Are pervs only pervs if you don't find them attractive? -- Rick Yancey
Empty the vessel of hope and faith and trust and you can fill it with anything you like. They -- Rick Yancey
But monsters, I now know, come in all shapes and sizes, and only their appetite for human flesh defines them. -- Rick Yancey
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
Too many people say something when they really have nothing to say. -- Rick Yancey
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
Hold on tight, Sam." He puts me in a choke hold. "Ahhh," I gasp. "Not that tight. -- Rick Yancey
A flawless, self-sustaining loop, an immaculate system in which trust and cooperation can never take root. Progress becomes impossible, for all strangers are potential enemies, the 'other' who must be hunted down until the last bullet is spent. You -- Rick Yancey
There's an old saying about the truth setting you free. Don't buy it. Sometimes the truth slams the cell door shut and throws a thousand bolts. -- Rick Yancey
The thing about killing is you don't know if you can actually do it until you actually do it. -- Rick Yancey
I have one half of one half second to decide. -- Rick Yancey
Though I understand the theology behind it, the image does not bring me peace; it makes me feel sorry for the lion. It strips him of his essence, the fundamental part of his being. A lion that does not behave as a lion i snot a lion. It isn't even the lion's opposite. It's a mockery of a lion. -- Rick Yancey
It would change everything, gentlemen. It would shift the entire balance of power in Europe-maybe the world. Alexander conquered half of it. Think what he would have done with arrows dipped in monster snot! -- Rick Yancey
They [demons] came before any of the rules had been written. -- Rick Yancey
Who does this teenage version of the Brawny paper-towel guy think he's kidding? -- Rick Yancey
His gaze is warm. My legs are cold. -- Rick Yancey
Into the counter behind her; her stick-thin arms fly into the air. I whip to my right, toward Razor, in time to see his chest blown apart by the kneeling recruit's round. -- Rick Yancey
Every face is new now, every face a stranger's face. -- Rick Yancey
The world ended once. It will end again. The world ends, then the world comes back. The world always comes back. -- Rick Yancey
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
If the world breaks a million and one promises, can you trust the million and second? -- Rick Yancey
It wasn't a good fake smile. You could always tell when she was faking, because she didn't look friendly; she looked like she was going to throw up. -- Rick Yancey
When you take the humanity out of humans, you are left with humans with no humanity. In other words, you get what you paid for ... -- Rick Yancey
Half the world prays they will be given what they deserve, and the other half that they will not. -- Rick Yancey
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
The monstrumologist laughed, and lifted his face toward the bleeding sky. -- Rick Yancey
we are the conquerors of the undiscovered country, an island of life centered in a boundless sea of blood. -- Rick Yancey
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
One lesson I learned from 'The Monstrumologist' was never to get too attached to your own characters. That's harder in practice than in theory. At the end of the third book - which coincided with the end of my contract - I was an emotional wreck. I mourned Will Henry and Warthrop. -- Rick Yancey
In the 4th Wave, you can't trust that people are still people. But you can trust that your gun is still your gun. -- Rick Yancey
For a being more advanced than I am, he sure has a hard time answering a simple question -- Rick Yancey
The monstrous act by definition demands a monster. -- Rick Yancey
The uncertainty of my own experience is crushing. I am drowning in an infinite sea. Sinking slowly, the weight of the lightless depths forcing me down, forcing the air from my lungs, squeezing the blood from my heart. -- Rick Yancey
Without trust there's no cooperation. And without cooperation there's no progress. History stops. -- Rick Yancey
It's over. It's never over. It isn't a line from that night to this day; it's a circle. -- Rick Yancey
The world was FUBAR now. And if you're not okay with that, you're just a corpse waiting to happen. -- Rick Yancey
The way is dark, the path is not straight. Easy to get lost, if you don't know the way, easy to go in circles, easy to find yourself at the place from which you began. -- Rick Yancey
But the most wonderful thing of all, our highest achievement and the one thing for which I pray we will always be remembered, is stuffing wads of polyester into an anatomically incorrect, cartoonish ideal of one of nature's most fearsome predators for no other reason than to soothe a child. -- Rick Yancey
The match was over before it began. When the game is fixed, how do you avoid losing? -- Rick Yancey
I steady him, he steadies me, the chain that binds us, the chain that sets us free.
- Ben Parish. -- Rick Yancey
He really was training me to be a soldier - by trying to kill me. -- Rick Yancey
Cities are more than the sum of their infrastructure. They transcend brick and mortar, concrete and steel. They're the vessels into which human knowledge is poured. -- Rick Yancey
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
The most delightful thing he's discovered about shooting someone is how ridiculously easy it is. Tying your shoes is harder. -- Rick Yancey
This place can't be heaven, it doesn't have the right vibe. -- Rick Yancey
It's the ancient instinct: In times of great danger, be wary of strangers. Trust no one outside your circle. But there's another instinct, far older, as old as life itself, nearly impossible for the human mind to override: Protect the young at all costs. Preserve the future." - Vosch -- Rick Yancey
For true beauty - beauty, as it were, with a capital B - is terrifying; it puts us in our place; it reflects back to us our own ugliness. It is the prize beyond price. -- Rick Yancey
When in the morning light I wake, teach me the path of love to take. -- Rick Yancey
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 -- Rick Yancey
There are some we cannot help but take an instant dislike to. -- Rick Yancey
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
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
Everything's broken?" he asked Cassie. "Everything?"
"No, not everything, Sams," she answered. "Not this."
She took his hand and put it against his chest, and his pounding heart pushed fiercely against his open palm.
"Unbroken," she said. -- Rick Yancey
If you wanted to separate humans from their humanity...killing laughter would be a good place to start. -- Rick Yancey
Fear didn't paralyze [her], like it did some humans. Fear crystallized her reason, hardened her will, clarified her options. -- Rick Yancey
It is a dark and dirty business, Will Henry. And you are well on your way." He patted my knee, not to congratulate, I think, but to console. His tone was sad and bitter. "You are well on your way. -- Rick Yancey
I have a very low tolerance for boredom and often think I would have missed out on books entirely if I'd grown up in the Internet and video game age. Now I enjoy books for people of all ages, including children. -- Rick Yancey
When you're out of options, the best option is to do nothing. Play dead. The possum option. -- Rick Yancey
The temperature of true rage is absolute zero, and mine is deeper than the ocean, wider than the universe. -- Rick Yancey
The wheat had survived the hail and lightning of the summer storms, but luck could not deliver it from the cold. By the time the refugees took shelter in the old house, the wheat was dead, killed by the hard fist of a deep frost. -- Rick Yancey
There's the bullshit you know that you know; the bullshit you don't know and know you don't know; and the bullshit you just think you know but really don't. -- Rick Yancey
We are one, you and I. Brothers in hate, brothers in cunning, brothers in the spirit of vengeance. -- Rick Yancey
It was the price of survival. The cost of his people's last, desperate gamble:
To rid his new home of humanity, he had to become human.
And being human, he had to overcome his humanity. -- Rick Yancey
It would make this a perfectly normal alien invasion. -- Rick Yancey
You know how we tell the good guys from the bad guys? The bad guys shoot at us.
Best lesson my father ever taught me. -- Rick Yancey
I bet you popped out of your momma with a gun in one hand and a doughnut in the other. -- Rick Yancey
Well, I tell myself, it could be worse. You could have been rescued by some fifty-year-old perv sporting a spare tire the size of a monster truck's who keeps his dead mother in the attic. -- Rick Yancey
Why the devil are you going again?
To save the doctor.
Save him from what?
Whatever he needs saving from. I'm his apprentice. -- Rick Yancey
He spreads his fingers over my heart, like he's holding it, like it belongs to him, the hard-fought-for territory he's won fair and square. -- Rick Yancey
Oculus Dei, the eyes of God. -- Rick Yancey
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
The foundation of all life, often obscured, never lost. Joy. -- Rick Yancey
One day private ringer you're going to smile at something I say and the world will break in half. -- Rick Yancey
If you can't trust anyone, then you can trust no one. -- Rick Yancey
Cruelty isn't a personality trait. Cruelty is a habit. -- Rick Yancey
It was a ludicrous notion, born of panic, but no panic is ludicrous in its particular moment. Panic possesses its own logical integrity. -- Rick Yancey
Because here's the thing: seeing yourself through another's eyes shifts your center of gravity. It doesn't change the way you look at yourself. It changes the way you look at the world. Not the you. The everything-but-you. -- Rick Yancey
I don't know how long I lay there, with the arms of dead people holding me. -- Rick Yancey
He just said don't ask questions," Megan whispers. "And then he asks if we have any questions. -- Rick Yancey
I had it all wrong," he says. "Before I found you, 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
We bear the unbearable. We endure the unendurable. We do what must be done until we ourselves are undone. -- Rick Yancey
The Earth dark and quiet, the way it was before we showed up to fill it with noise and light. Something ends. Something new begins. This was the in-between time. The pause. -- Rick Yancey
Because we're too hard to kill. We're invista ... investra ... invinta ... " "Invincible?" "That's it!" With a reassuring pat on my arm. "Invincible. -- Rick Yancey
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
What are our memories but the ultimate proof that we exist? -- Rick Yancey
I start to unbutton his shirt. "Got to get these clothes off," I mutter. "You don't know how long I've waited to hear you say that." Smile. Lopsided. Sexy. -- Rick Yancey
I left them there for the flies and the birds and the sun and the wind. In the silence outside the Tour du Silence, I left them. Where the faceless dead faced the sky, I left them there at the center of the world. -- Rick Yancey
You and everyone else on the planet," I said. "Nobody actually knows, and they won't tell us, so everybody sits around guessing and theorizing, and it's all kind of pointless. Maybe they're spacefaring micemen from Planet Cheese and they've come for our provolone. -- Rick Yancey
Dr. Warthrop chopped off my finger with a butcher knife. -- Rick Yancey
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
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
There was not breaking through the lie because accepting the truth would break them. -- Rick Yancey
Then you'll love chess. Chess is checkers on steroids. -- Rick Yancey
In case you're an alien and you're reading this: BITE ME. -- Rick Yancey
The world was ripping apart. And pieces of the wreckage were raining all around me. -- Rick Yancey
Killing humans - isn't that the aliens' job? -- Rick Yancey
Evan is the little branch growing out of the cliff that she clings to, and the fact that he's gone makes her hang on even tighter. -- Rick Yancey
The only way to stay alive is to stay alone. That's rule number two. -- Rick Yancey
But can you still trust love? -- Rick Yancey
You wanted to create a human without humanity. Now you're going to get one. -- Rick Yancey
WE ARE HUMANITY
~Ben -- Rick Yancey
Well, we had our shot. And we werent handling our inheritance very well. I bet if we could somehow go back and interview the dinosaurs before the asteroid struck.. -- Rick Yancey
He had given in to hope, and that will kill you. It kills you before you die. Long before you die. -- Rick Yancey
Silencer, was as good as any. It described his purpose: to snuff out the human noise. -- Rick Yancey
The world is large, dear Will, and we, no matter how much we would like to pretend otherwise, we are quite small. -- Rick Yancey
Time for the world to end. -- Rick Yancey
Human beings are remarkably resilient. When you think about it, our species has been teetering upon the edge of the existential cliff since Hiroshima. In short, we endure. -- Rick Yancey
You're never perfectly safe. No human being on Earth ever is or ever was. To live is to risk your life, your heart, everything. -- Rick Yancey
He was formulating a plan. He would redeem the dream. I could understand that. It is the universal blessing - and curse - of those who dare. -- Rick Yancey
Our enemy is fear. Blinding, reason-killing fear. Fear consumes the truth and poisons all the evidence, leading us to false assumptions and irrational conclusions. -- Rick Yancey
And in more than half the pictures, she isn't looking at the camera; she's looking at him. Not the way I would look at Ben Parish, all squishy around the eyes. She looks at Evan fiercely, like, This here? It's mine -- Rick Yancey
In case you don't know, we live on a restless planet. The -- Rick Yancey
Even the longest journey is a circle, and history will always cycle back to the place where it began. From the missal: Remember you are dust and unto dust you shall return. -- Rick Yancey
Paimon would never believe the lie I was about to tell. That was the really weird thing about evil. Lying to God was better than lying to the devil: Good will forgive you. -- Rick Yancey
I don't care what the stars say about how small we are. One, even the smallest, weakest, most insignificant one, matters. -- Rick Yancey
The intervening years are sucked down these acheronian halls like light into a black hole while you helplessly teeter upon the event horizon, where time is measured by the beating of a fly's wing in the stagnant air. -- Rick Yancey
You can't band together to fight without trust. And without trust, there was no hope. -- Rick Yancey
And far more dangerous than greed or lust or envy or any of those things - or anything - was love. -- Rick Yancey
We call Chess the game of Kings, because through chess, we learn how to rule kings -- Rick Yancey
learning to let go of my rage and embrace the howling emptiness and -- Rick Yancey
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
How do you rid the Earth of humans? You rid the humans of their humanity. -- Rick Yancey
His were the eyes of one who had seen too much suffering to take suffering too seriously. -- Rick Yancey
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
Limitless. Without borders, without boundaries. -- Rick Yancey
They would break his body. Crush his will. Dissect his mind down to the last synapse.
The undoing of Evan Walker had begun -- Rick Yancey
There's a hero in every heart waiting for the dragon to come out. -- Rick Yancey
I might have some issues with fear. -- Rick Yancey
That's it," he said bitterly. "Cry, Cassie. Cry for her. Cry for all the children. They can't hear you and they can't see you and can't feel how really bad you feel, but cry for them. A tear for each of them, fill up the fucking ocean, cry. -- Rick Yancey
The next thing you do when the plug's pulled, after panicking, is run to the nearest window. You don't know why exactly. It's that better-see-what's-going-on feeling. The world works from the outside in. So if the lights go off, you look outside. -- Rick Yancey
He fell in love, and love is the only weakness. -- Rick Yancey
Speaking of fruit, I'm down
I mean, he's down
to his underwear. -- Rick Yancey
You can't make yourself believe anything," he answers softly. "But you can let yourself believe. You can allow yourself to trust. -- Rick Yancey
What?" I ask the back of his head. "Now you're giving me the silent treatment?" His shoulders jiggle up and down. You know, one of those wry, silent chuckles, accompanied by a rueful shake of the head. Girls! So silly. -- Rick Yancey
I know you said you can't make yourself trust - so, damn it, make somebody else trust. Make me trust. -- Rick Yancey
I am a shark. A shark who dreamed he was a man. -- Rick Yancey
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
But we'll get up, and go through hell again. Because we will die, but we'll die unbroken. -- Rick Yancey
The world was FUBAR now. -- Rick Yancey
Our betrayals, our jealousies, our fears, they rise no higher than the tops of our heads. -- Rick Yancey
I know what you're thinking," he says.
"No. You don't."
"You're wondering if you should kiss me good-bye. -- Rick Yancey
Tears welled in his eyes. It was like watching chocolate melt. -- Rick Yancey
I'm a disease. That's what I am to you. -- Rick Yancey
Single death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic. -- Rick Yancey
What happens when the sowers of mistrust become its reapers? -- Rick Yancey
You know you've reached a very sad place when the only person who can make you laugh is yourself. -- Rick Yancey
Beautiful is another word we tossed around too casually, slopping it over everything from cars to nail polish until the word collapsed under the weight of all the banality. But the world is beautiful. I hope they never forget that. The world is beautiful. -- Rick Yancey
The world begins again. Humanity owes its existence to a bit of cosmic whimsy. To a rock. It -- Rick Yancey
one out of every three surviving human beings on Earth is one of them. -- Rick Yancey
the silence of the void, as if the world stopped breathing and -- Rick Yancey
I am a scientist, and therefore an absolute realist. -- Rick Yancey
saw he had not been scraping at an exposed rib. He had been cleaning the thing's teeth. -- Rick Yancey
Im a shark cassie, a shark who dreamed he was a man -- Rick Yancey
I couldn't outrun them. I couldn't outgun them. Maybe I could outsmart them. -- Rick Yancey
God doesn't call the equipped, son. God equips the called. And you have been called. -- Rick Yancey
Oh, Sam, you have the face of a child but the eyes of an old man. -- Rick Yancey
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
He showed me how enormous the emptiness was by filling it. -- Rick Yancey
Death had brought an end to their misery. Would nothing but a visitation from that same dark angel bring and end to mine? -- Rick Yancey
Why do we always get the Evan we deserve instead of the Evan we want? -- Rick Yancey
I've loved sci-fi and speculative fiction since I was a kid. It was inevitable I'd try my hand at it at some point. -- Rick Yancey
The girl sleeping and the finisher, willing himself to finish her.
Why didn't he finish her?
Why couldn't he finish her? -- Rick Yancey
I knew it to the bottom of my soul: You're going to die. This wasn't about survival. It was about payback. -- Rick Yancey
Do you know how to tell who the enemy is, Cassie? -- Rick Yancey
Still, you tend to believe what you always believed, think what you always thought, expect what you always expected -- Rick Yancey
Damn it, why does he have to be so damn beautiful? And why do I have to be so damn aware of it? -- Rick Yancey
And no answer when we sent our message. Something like, Hello, welcome to Earth. Hope you enjoy your stay. Please don't kill us. -- Rick Yancey
But I don't panic. I don't bolt like a frightened gazelle. I am more than the sum of my fear. It isn't fear that will defeat them. Not fear or faith or hope or even love, but rage. -- Rick Yancey
It's her eyes that get to me. The deep dark of them. Is nothing there - or nearly everything? -- Rick Yancey
Every face he saw was the face of a corpse-to-be. His world was peopled with living ghosts -- Rick Yancey
I didn't save you," he whispers, lips tickling my eyelashes. "You saved me. -- Rick Yancey
We regarded each other across an expanse wider than the universe, within a space thinner than a razor's edge. -- Rick Yancey
The only truth is the truth of the now. There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. There is no morality, but the morality of the moment. -- Rick Yancey
He's my itty-bitty bush growing out of the cliff that I cling to. -- Rick Yancey
I can't decide if he's holding me back or holding me up. -- Rick Yancey
It's the lady, then," he murmured. -- Rick Yancey
Don't let them get me, Cassie. Don't let me die.'
'You're not going to die, Sams.'
'Promise?'
I Promised. -- Rick Yancey
I don't care where we go, as long as it's not Dubuque!" Dumbo -- Rick Yancey
Do you know why they [demons] hate us so much, Alfred? Because of hope.
They have none, and so they hate us for it. -- Rick Yancey
I should have bailed. That little voice had my back. That little voice is older than I am. It's older than the oldest person who ever lived. I should have listened to that voice. -- Rick Yancey
Will isn't my little bastard assistant. Will is Pellinore Warthrop's little bastard assistant. -- Rick Yancey
I built a fortress safe and strong to last a thousand years. A mighty stronghold that crumbles with a kiss -- Rick Yancey
On the table beside me is a book entitled Love's Desperate Desire. Based on the cover, I would have called it My Spectacular Washboard Abs. -- Rick Yancey
We are here, and then we are gone, and it's not about the time we're, but what we do with that time. -- Rick Yancey
That first inch was the hardest. The longest inch in the universe. The inch that stretched a thousand miles. -- Rick Yancey
We stared into the eyes of death and death blinked first. Youd think that would make us feel invincible. It didnt -- Rick Yancey
Give someone the power of the gods and he will become as indifferent as the gods. -- Rick Yancey
The cold stars spun to the ancient rhythm, the august march of an everlasting symphony. They are old, the stars, and their memory is long. -- Rick Yancey
to break the bonds of distrust is natural human sympathy. Pity has killed more people than hate. -- Rick Yancey
Sullivan had her Crucifix Soldier and now I have mine. No. I am the soldier. Teacup is the cross. -- Rick Yancey
Back into your box, anonymous Yorick, with your sutured eyes and frozen scream! The indignity of your internment is no worse than ours. -- Rick Yancey
I thought I knew what loneliness was before he found me, but I had no clue. You don't know what real loneliness is until you've known the opposite. -- Rick Yancey
I always feel trepidation at the beginning of every project. I worry about so many things. Time to get it right, the skill to do it justice, the will to finish. I also worry about more mundane things, like what if my computer crashes and I've forgotten to back up the manuscript? -- Rick Yancey
The next time you better have a good reason," I tease him. "Okay." He kisses me again.
"Reason?" I ask softly. "Um. You're really pretty?"
"That's a good one. I don't know if it's true, but it's good. -- Rick Yancey
Private Zombie, did your mother have any children that lived?"
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
"I bet when you were born she took one look at you and tried to shove you back in! -- Rick Yancey
Oh, very well," he said crossly. "Come along if you must, but please keep quiet so I may think. I need to think!"
"Yes, sir," I said, pulling on my clothes. "I will try not to be a burden to you sir. -- Rick Yancey
There is no loneliness more profound, in my experience, than being ignored by one's sole companion in life. -- Rick Yancey
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
Our voices, wrapping around each other's, entwining, and then tugging free, in the pitch black. -- Rick Yancey
Just because a man is a homicidal maniac doesn't make him wrong. -- Rick Yancey
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
It's been a while since I've written a novel aimed at the adult market, but I never sit down and say to myself, 'Okay, now I'm going to write something for us old folks.' I get gripped by an idea, and I go where the idea takes me. -- Rick Yancey
Nothing makes us love something more than the loss of it. -- Rick Yancey
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
She whips the hose back and forth, laughing as he chases it, the fleeting, uncatchable colors, shimmering splinters of the golden light. Catch the rainbow, Sammy! Catch the rainbow! -- Rick Yancey
Please, do not leave me, Will Henry. I would not survive it. You were nearly right. What Mr. Kendall was, I am always on the brink of becoming. And you - I do not pretend to know how or even why - but you pull me back from the precipice. You are the one ... You are the one thing that keeps me Human. -- Rick Yancey
He knew the truth. Yes, my dear child, he would undoubtedly tell a terrified toddler tremulously seeking succor, monsters are real. I happen to have one hanging in my basement. -- Rick Yancey
We are hunters all. We are, all of us, monstrumologists. And Pellinore Warthrop was the best of us, for he had found the courage to turn and face the most terrifying monster of all. -- Rick Yancey
He lied the way a parent lies to you, the good lie that helps you go to sleep. -- Rick Yancey
Poets never die, I thought. They just fail in the end. -- Rick Yancey
Remember, Will Henry, some falsehoods are borne of necessity not foolishness. -- Rick Yancey
Something weird," Ben said. "You would think, with ninety-nine percent of us gone, the two percent would get along better."
Um, that would be one percent, Parish. -- Rick Yancey
The world is a clock and the clock has wound to its final second - why -- Rick Yancey
Tampons. I'm constantly worrying about my stash and if I'll be able to find more. -- Rick Yancey
I'm not encouraged by the silence. I can think of no benign reason for it. 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 turned out for the Native Americans. -- Rick Yancey
The Eye will take care of her. -- Rick Yancey
Don't decide how you feel about something before you try it. -- Rick Yancey
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
I thought of the unblemished thing, the thing that lasts, and I thought the only thing with the power to save us also had the power to slay us. -- Rick Yancey
There is beauty that soothes like the warm kiss of the spring sun upon the cheek, and then there is beauty that terrifies, like the cry of Ozymandias, inviting despair. -- Rick Yancey
Whoa. That sounds, well ... crazy. Crazy: the new normal. I guess I could call myself crazy, since there is one other person I can compare myself to: me. -- Rick Yancey
My plan is to say whatever is necessary to avoid killing again. Unless I'm given no choice. And then I will kill again.
Evan was right: It does get a little easier each time. -- Rick Yancey
When civilizations collide, it usually isn't the more primitive one that prevails. -- Rick Yancey
Let us go then, you and I, like Alice down the rabbit hole, to a time when there still were dark places in the world, and there were men who dared to delve into them.
An old man, I am a boy again.
And dead, the monstrumologist lives. -- Rick Yancey
Well, I suppose nearly anything is possible, though some things are much more possible than others! -- Rick Yancey
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
England is home to one of the most unattractive people on earth!" He glared at Walker. "You are the perfect example. -- Rick Yancey
I'm determined, when the time comes, to at least go out with clean teeth. -- Rick Yancey
If you don't kill all of us all at once, those who remain will not be the weak.
It's the strong who remain, the bent but unbroken, like the iron rods that used to give this concrete its strength. -- Rick Yancey
I would kill for a cheeseburger. Honestly. If I stumbled across someone eating a cheeseburger, I would kill them for it. -- Rick Yancey
The aliens of 'The 5th Wave' are not the aliens we've imagined. Not the aliens we'd like to attack us. -- Rick Yancey
Until we've killed everyone who isn't tagged." Another step. Right in front of me now. The end of the gun pressing lightly against her chest. "It's the 5th Wave, Ben. -- Rick Yancey
It wasn't aliens that first made us gear up for war; it was our fellow humans. -- Rick Yancey
Why did they come billions of miles just to stare at us? It's rude. -- Rick Yancey
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
I really kill myself on titles, although 'The 5th Wave' seems like an obvious title, doesn't it? You don't know how long that took me. -- Rick Yancey
Prayers and promises. The one his sister made to him. The unspoken one I made to my sister. Prayers are promises, too, and these are the days of broken promises. -- Rick Yancey
I'm lost, Zombie." "I'll find you." "I can't move." "I'll carry you. -- Rick Yancey
We cried openly over the ones we lost. We wept secretly for our smartphones, our cars, our microwave ovens, and the Internet. -- Rick Yancey
If you're an insect, then you're a mayfly. Here for a day and then gone. -- Rick Yancey
When I cry - when I let myself cry - that's who I cry for. I don't cry for myself. I cry for the Cassie that's gone.
And I wonder what that Cassie would think of me.
The Cassie who kills. -- Rick Yancey
That's the way of every human catastrophe. The douchebag is nearly indestructible. -- Rick Yancey
I found you, but in finding you, I lost myself. -- Rick Yancey
Self-pity is egotism undiluted, after all - self-centeredness in its purest form. -- Rick Yancey
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
The first rule: Trust no one. Which leads to the second rule: The only way to stay alive as long as possible is to stay alone as long as possible. Now I've broken both. -- Rick Yancey
Climb onto my shoulders. I will not let you fall. -- Rick Yancey
I don't make the weather. You got a beef, take it up with God. That's what I've been doing a lot lately: taking it up with God. Like: God, WTF? -- Rick Yancey
To hell with monsters and to hell with men. There is no difference to me. -- Rick Yancey
Perhaps that is our doom, our human curse, to never really know one another. -- Rick Yancey
You can feel it deep in your bones because it's older than your senses: the end of winter, the Earth sliding toward Spring. -- Rick Yancey
it's better to be lucky than smart, gave -- Rick Yancey
You could see the smile coming a year before it arrived. -- Rick Yancey
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
He's entitled to his opinion, but that's all it is. An opinion. -- Rick Yancey
If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans. - Stephen Hawking -- Rick Yancey
They say no one knows the Bible better than the devil. -- Rick Yancey
Remember me...When all else has been forgotten. -- Rick Yancey
The human brain has a marvelous capacity to screen and sort experience, protecting itself against the unbearable. -- Rick Yancey
Sometimes in my tent, late at night, I think I can hear the stars scraping against the sky. -- Rick Yancey
I didn't show up here to give your life purpose now that your life's over. That's up to you to figure out. -- Rick Yancey
Ha-ha. The dumb jock who can't talk the Queen's English. I swear to God, the next person who corrects my grammar gets punched in the face. -- Rick Yancey
Are you crying, Ringer?"
"My eyes are watering."
"No."
"Don't tell me no, Razor. I don't cry."
"Bullshit. -- Rick Yancey
There's nothing left to say. There's a million things left to say. -- Rick Yancey
Run equals die. Stay equals die. So before we go all O.K. Corral on this, let's consider the third option: We blow it up. -- Rick Yancey
I was never very good at history, but I was pretty sure douchebags like Hitler didn't laugh very much. -- Rick Yancey
Pining for things we lost is the same as hoping for things that can never be. Both roads dead-end in despair. -- Rick Yancey
Sometimes you say things to your fear - things like It doesn't matter, the words acting like pats on the head of a hyper dog. -- Rick Yancey
Talking about the problem had replaced actually doing something about it. -- Rick Yancey
equal-opportunity sadist. -- Rick Yancey
Oh, you're such a hopeless case, Cassie. Such a train wreck. -- Rick Yancey
When you look death in the eye and death blinks first, nothing seems impossible. -- Rick Yancey
There was, like, this black hole where the world used to be, and we were both falling toward it. What could we hold on to? -- Rick Yancey
The doctor frowned upon drinking and often expressed wonderment at men who willingly made imbeciles of themselves. -- Rick Yancey
The boot hasn't crushed the roach.Not yet. -- Rick Yancey
Ah. And then you kill him."
"No," Arkwright replied patiently. "We are British. We avoid murder if we can help it.{...} -- Rick Yancey
I see the world through a diaphanous curtain of blood. -- Rick Yancey
Crazy people. They never think they're crazy. Their craziness makes perfect sense to them. -- Rick Yancey
The nights did not come gently but seemed to slam down angrily upon the Earth. -- Rick Yancey
I will teach you to love death. I will empty you of grief and guilt and self-pity and fill you up with hate and cunning and the spirit of vengeance. I will make my final stand here, Benjamin Thomas Parish. -- Rick Yancey
Better not to remember. Better not to know. You can't mourn what you never had. -- Rick Yancey
A thousand ways. Focus on the one way. -- Rick Yancey
Bitterness finds pleasure in the spot from which bitterness springs. -- Rick Yancey
I am more than the sum of my fear. -- Rick Yancey
He asks me what happened to my leg. I told him I was shot by a shark. He doesn't react. Doesn't seem confused or amused or anything. Like getting shot by a shark is a perfectly natural thing in the aftermath of the arrival. -- Rick Yancey
In a thousand years, you could hold the entirety of the city in the palm of your hand. -- Rick Yancey
It only takes one. Just one, and the world changes. -- Rick Yancey
Nothing is more painful than the loneliness of being with someone who is never completely there. -- Rick Yancey
The world existed for a very long time before this particular set of seven billion billion atoms came along and it will go right on after they're scattered up, down and sideways. -- Rick Yancey
Some things you can never leave behind. They don't belong to the past. They belong to you. -- Rick Yancey
Entrusting her memory to the wind, to the embrace of the silent sentinel trees and to the care of the faithful stars, her namesake, pure and everlasting, the uncontained universe contained in her: Cassiopeia. -- Rick Yancey
Daddy said the world was dividing into two camps: runners and nesters. -- Rick Yancey
Oh, Will Henry. After all we have been through, how could I send you away now, at our most critical hour? You are indispensable to me. -- Rick Yancey
It's hopeless. And it's stupid. It's suicidal. But love is a weapon they have no answer for. They know how you think, but they can't know what you feel. -- Rick Yancey
The dead have their reward, Vosch says. It is the living - you and I - who still have work to do -- Rick Yancey
You know what you do when you can't stand up and march, soldier? Vosch asks. You crawl. -- Rick Yancey
You belong to them now. Vosch the sculptor, my body the clay, but not my spirit, never my soul. Unconquered. Uncrushed. Uncontained. -- Rick Yancey
It is a detestable vice not entirely limited to children. Always speak the truth, all the truth in all things at all times! No man ever rose to greatness on the wings of obsequious deceit. -- Rick Yancey
If there was any hope left, it lay in love's hopeless promises. -- Rick Yancey
These are the secrets I have kept. This is the trust I never betrayed.
But he is dead now and has been for more than forty years, the one who gave me his trust, the one for whom I kept these secrets.
The one who saved me ... and the one who cursed me. -- Rick Yancey
All things do happen for a reason ... Is this not the foundation of our faith? You are here-all of us-because we are but part of a plan prepared before the foundations of the earth. It is our humble duty to discern our role in that plan. -- Rick Yancey
People die. Love endures. -- Rick Yancey
But we fall only that we might rise, Alfred. All of us fall; all of us, as you say, screw up. Falling is not important. It is how we get up after the fall that's important. -- Rick Yancey
This was it, the thing between us, the thing neither of us could put our fingers on, the unbreakable bond between love and fear. Evan's the love. I am the fear. -- Rick Yancey
She traveled the world and wrote books and took lovers and broke hearts. She didn't allow life just to happen to her. She punched and pummeled and beat the living shit out of it. She mauled it. -- Rick Yancey
The doctor was a private man, engaged in a dark and dangerous business, and could ill afford the prying eyes and gossiping tongue of the servant class. -- Rick Yancey
I am the one,
Not Running,
Not Staying,
But FACING -- Rick Yancey
Who wants to read a book when you can blow something up? -- Rick Yancey
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
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
The world is a clock winding down. -- Rick Yancey
the story of a queen named Cassiopeia who lived forever on a throne in the sky. -- Rick Yancey
It was about killing us. All of us. -- Rick Yancey
A man lies upon the floor, spreads his arms, and transforms himself into a ship of a thousand sails. -- Rick Yancey
Really, science is wonderful, but why does it tend to suck all the joyous mystery from the world? -- Rick Yancey
His heart, the war.
Her face, the battlefield. -- Rick Yancey
Back around the counter to fetch my rifle. Rifle, sidearm, knife, a couple of flash grenades. And one more thing, the most essential weapon in my arsenal: a heart full of rage. -- Rick Yancey
The truth is you don't know shit. I don't know shit. Nobody knows shit. -- Rick Yancey
I was woefully ignorant in the social graces. I was being raised, after all, by Pellinore Warthrop. -- Rick Yancey
We have survived the death of our childhood. We are soldiers now, maybe the last soldiers who will ever fight, the Earth's final and only hope, united as one in the spirit of vengeance. -- Rick Yancey
Books? They're heavy and take up room in my already bulging backpack. But I have a thing about books. -- Rick Yancey
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
He stiffened and said with great dignity, I am a natural scientist. We are accustomed to dealing with shit. -- Rick Yancey
Forgiveness is not born out of innocence or ignorance. Forgiveness is born of love. -- Rick Yancey
The future of humanity belongs to the hardcore. -- Rick Yancey
There are times when fear is not our enemy. There are times when fear is our truest, sometimes only, friend. -- Rick Yancey
Promises are the only currency left. They must be spent wisely. -- Rick Yancey
Who needs a 12th System when you have a heart like Cassie Sullivans's? -- Rick Yancey
The 12th System can protect you from the pain that afflicts your body, but it's helpless against the pain that crushes your soul. -- Rick Yancey
In every creepy movie ever made, the barn is the prime nesting ground for the things you don't know you're looking for and always regret finding. -- Rick Yancey
That's what you do when the curtain is falling
you give the line that the audience wants to hear. -- Rick Yancey
To conquer, you must endure not just your own suffering but the suffering of others. Indifference is the ultimate evolutionary achievement, the highest rung on nature's ladder. -- Rick Yancey
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
It's about being hardcore. Because this is the last war, and only the hardcore will survive it. -- Rick Yancey
Because we will die, but at least we will die unbroken. -- Rick Yancey
You invited me here to slay dragons, did you not? Well. That's what I'm trying to do. -- Rick Yancey
Soon I will fall asleep and I will wake from this terrible dream. The endless night will fall, and I will rise. -- Rick Yancey
What were they thinking? 'It's an alien apocalypse! Quick, grab the beer! -- Rick Yancey
He didn't like to see animals in captivity. When he looked into their eyes, something in their eyes looked back at him. -- Rick Yancey
To hold on, you have to find something that you're willing to die for. -- Rick Yancey
When you love someone. Something happens to them, and it's a punch in the heart. Not like a punch in the heart; a real punch in the heart. -- Rick Yancey
Indifference is the ultimate evolutionary achievement. -- Rick Yancey
I open my mouth and the words come out. They just come out. Fuck you. -- Rick Yancey
That's how it'll go down. Those will be the last words of the last one left. I am human. -- Rick Yancey
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
After another hour in the dark and stuffy gym, I saw my dad appear in the doorway. He gave a little wave, like he showed up at my school every day to take me home after alien attacks. -- Rick Yancey
It's like a cockroach working up a plan to defeat the shoe on its way down to crush it. -- Rick Yancey
Despair is a wholly selfish response to fortune's slings and arrows. -- Rick Yancey
It's hard to plan for what comes next when what comes next is not something you planned for. -- Rick Yancey
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
And then Evan Walker kisses me. -- Rick Yancey
But I am even more than this. I am all those they remember, the ones they loved, everyone they knew, and everyone they only heard about. How many are contained in me? Count the stars. Go on, number the grains of sand. That's me.
I am humanity. -- Rick Yancey
But there're the things we tell ourselves about the truth, and there're the things the truth tells about us. -- Rick Yancey
the man with the rifle watches the stars as if waiting for them to shake loose from the black and tumble to the Earth. Why -- Rick Yancey
Maybe the last human being on Earth won't die of starvation or exposure or as a meal of wild animals.
Maybe the last one to die will be killed by the last one alive. -- Rick Yancey
They rest in us and we in them. Our heart contains all others. One heart, one life, on the advent of a mayfly's final flight -- Rick Yancey
I always assumed it owed more to the fact that he didn't like me. -- Rick Yancey
Too much hope?" The side of her mouth twitches. "Maybe that's our secret weapon. -- Rick Yancey
Maybe you reach a certain point in evolution where boredom is the greatest threat to your survival. Maybe this isn't a planetary takeover at all, but a game. Like a kid pulling wings off flies. -- Rick Yancey
Don't just die then, die trying. -- Rick Yancey
Like any omnipresent smell - or rather, like anything omnipresent - you get used to it; you stop smelling it after a while. Same is true for your other senses. And your soul. -- Rick Yancey
When that moment comes- and it always comes- when your life teeters between giving up and getting up, when you can't give up and you can't get up, either, here's what you do ... Crawl. -- Rick Yancey
For some, death is the midwife to faith. For others, it is faith's executioner. -- Rick Yancey
The bent but unbroken ones. -- Rick Yancey
You're mortal, and only a mortal can afford to be romantic. When we conquered death, we murdered love. -- Rick Yancey
It's an either/or world now. -- Rick Yancey
I'm actually very good, he said matter-of-factly. Even when he says something that, on paper, sounds like bragging, it isn't. It's the way he says it, casually, like he's talking about the weather. -- Rick Yancey
Okay, don't just die, then. Die trying. -- Rick Yancey
Perhaps God waits for us to be empty, so he may fill us with himself. -- Rick Yancey
Understand their hatred is beyond human comprehension. They abhor the Creator and so also the creation. Whatever brings joy, whatever brings peace, whatever redeems the dark deed or relieves the terrors of the night and their enemies. -- Rick Yancey
Crazy: the new normal. -- Rick Yancey
He shakes his head. I touch his knee, then pull my hand back quickly. After the first touch, touching becomes too easy. -- Rick Yancey
One of those questions you don't want to know the answer to, but still have to ask. -- Rick Yancey
You don't feel like it's going to happen to you ... until it happens to you. -- Rick Yancey
I don't move. I wait behind my log, terrified. Over the past ten minutes, it's become such a dear friend, I consider naming it: Howard, my pet log. -- Rick Yancey
I've always sucked at games of chance. Always hated them for that reason. -- Rick Yancey
The world is screaming. -- Rick Yancey
You be America, alien invaders, and we'll be Vietnam.
And the Others go, Yeah, okay, right. -- Rick Yancey
If the enemy looks just like you, how do you fight him? -- Rick Yancey
The world is screaming. The world is being burned alive. -- Rick Yancey
I might have kissed her here," said Pellinore Warthrop to himself
the fugitive, the prisoner. "I do not remember. -- Rick Yancey
by its makers after centuries of careful -- Rick Yancey
I will trade my self-pity for hate. My guilt for cunning. My grief for the spirit of vengeance. -- Rick Yancey
You know how sometimes you tell yourself that you have a choice, but really you don't have a choice? Just because there are alternatives doesn't mean they apply to you. -- Rick Yancey
Lying was the worst kind of buffoonery. -- Rick Yancey
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
My anger is greater than the sum of all things lost. -- Rick Yancey
A shark who dreamed he was a man. -- Rick Yancey
Where the body went, the mind followed. -- Rick Yancey
Outiko is not hunted; Outiko hunts, the ogimaa had said. You do not call Outiko. Outiko calls you. -- Rick Yancey
Fifty yards away. The muzzle velocity of a M16 is 3,100 feet per second. Three feet in a yard, which means he has two-thirds of a second left on Earth. -- Rick Yancey
temperature of true rage is absolute zero, and -- Rick Yancey
Because that's what you do when the curtain is falling, you say the line the audience wants to hear. -- Rick Yancey
It isn't up to me to break his heart; that's time's job. -- Rick Yancey
We have just discovered our dear colleague butchered in a hotel room, and you wish to discuss literature? -- Rick Yancey
It's why a kid army makes sense. Adults don't waste their time on magical thinking. They dwell on the same inconvenient truths that -- Rick Yancey
Who are you Evan? If that's evan your name. Even your name. -- Rick Yancey
But hope is no less realistic than despair. It is still our choice whether to live in light or lie down in darkness. -- Rick Yancey
Aliens are stupid. -- Rick Yancey
The cruelest aspect of love ... is its inviolable integrity. -- Rick Yancey
Then I strip the pants away from each leg, like peeling a banana. That's it, the perfect metaphor: peeling a banana. -- Rick Yancey
So you put all your doubts in a little box and bury it deep and then try to forget where you buried it. My -- Rick Yancey
There are things that are too terrible to remember, and there are things that are almost too wonderful to recall. -- Rick Yancey
In every heart, there lives a Jack Kearns. -- Rick Yancey
Math?" "Yeah, math. Aren't all you Asians really good at math? -- Rick Yancey
Not bragging too much, but I had to be careful never to smile while I drove: It had the capacity to blind oncoming traffic. -- Rick Yancey
It wasn't about saving us. And it wasn't about enslaving us or herding us into reservations. It was about killing us. All of us. -- Rick Yancey
That's a stupid question,' said Malachi. 'Because he didn't warn him. He didn't warn anyone.'
'No, it's a philosophical question,' Kearns corrected him. 'Which makes it useless, not stupid. -- Rick Yancey
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
I'm one, too," he said.
"What?"
He spit a wad of blood and mucus into the dirt. "A virgin."
What a shock.
"What makes you think I'm a virgin?" I asked.
"You wouldn't have hit me if you weren't. -- Rick Yancey
We don't have passports. -- Rick Yancey
Sarcasm doesn't appear to work on him. If that's true, I'm in trouble: It's my normal mode of communication. -- Rick Yancey
Okay. What if we were the last two people on Earth?" "Then you'd still end up being the last, because I'd kill myself. -- Rick Yancey
Some things you don't have to promise. You just do. -- Rick Yancey
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
You're all they have, -- Rick Yancey
Even the most open person has a private, sacred place where no one else may go. -- Rick Yancey
Lies are complicated. The truth is simple. -- Rick Yancey
We're the dead. There's no one else now. There's the past-dead and the future-dead. Corpses and corpses-to-be. -- Rick Yancey
In the end it wouldn't be the lucky ones left standing. -- Rick Yancey
That was a good thing a bad thing or a thing that was neither good nor bad, but whatever it was, good, bad or neither , depended on your point of -- Rick Yancey
Cuticle care can tell you a lot about a person. -- Rick Yancey
We'd stared into Death's eyes and Death blinked first. -- Rick Yancey
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
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
So I do the thing most reasonable people would in my situation. I run. -- Rick Yancey
Cursing is the crutch of an unimaginative mind. -- Rick Yancey
In the name of all that is holy, tell me why God felt the need to make a hell. It seems so redundant. -- Rick Yancey
Blurting out first thoughts is something I really should work on - if I live past the next five minutes. -- Rick Yancey
If you are human, there is no hope. -- Rick Yancey
He doesn't want to know; he has to know. -- Rick Yancey
I couldn't decide who was more annoying, the fanatic or the cynic. -- Rick Yancey
And, in the end, we lie awake And we dream of making our escape. -- Rick Yancey
I know a way -- I just don't know the way to the way. -- Rick Yancey
Whoever's not with us is against us. That kind of thinking nearly brought an end to history, more than once. This -- Rick Yancey
I think we're seriously screwed when the men with guns decided to help the bad guys. -- Rick Yancey
Our hearts, the war.
Her body, the battlefield. -- Rick Yancey
Number forty-nine has been mapped. -- Rick Yancey
And you need help with that? Feeling human? -- Rick Yancey
Doesn't want to leave, doesn't have an excuse to stay. -- Rick Yancey
The harder survival becomes, the more you want to pull together. And the more you want to pull together, the harder survival becomes. -- Rick Yancey