Rick Yancey Quotes - Page 2

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
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
Let’s establish a code for when you want to go all creeper on me. One knock means you’d like to come in. Two means you’re just stopping by to spy on me while I sleep.” His eyes travel from my face to my shirt (which happens to be his shirt) to my bare legs, lingering a breath too long before returning to my face. His gaze is warm. My legs are cold.Then he knocks once on the jamb. But it’s the smile that gets him in.
Rick Yancey
Do you know a way out of here?” I ask Ben. Sammy’s more trusting than I am, but the idea’s worth exploring. Finding the escape pods—if they even exist—has always been the weakest part of my getaway plan.He nods. “Do you?”“I know a way—I just don’t know the way to the way.”“The way to the way? Okay.” He grins. He looks like hell, but the smile hasn’t changed a bit. It lights up the tunnel like a thousand-watt bulb. “I know the way and the way to the way.
Rick Yancey
The world is a clock winding down.I hear it in the wind’s icy fingers scratching against the window. I smell it in the mildewed carpeting and the rotting wallpaper of the old hotel. And I feel it in Teacup’s chest as she sleeps. The hammering of her heart, the rhythm of her breath, warm in the freezing air, the clock winding down.
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
This place can't be heaven, it doesn't have the right vibe.
Rick Yancey
Crazy people. They never think they're crazy. Their craziness makes perfect sense to them.
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
We regarded each other across an expanse wider than the universe, within a space thinner than a razor's edge.
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
And John Kearns whispered into my ear: "Do you see it now? *You* are the nest. *You* are the hatchling. *You* are the chrysalis. *You* are the progeny. *You* are the rot that falls from the stars. All of us--you and I and poor, dear Pellinore. Behold the face of the magnificum, child. And despair."Though I was sickened by the sight, I looked. In the bower of the beast at the top of the world, I beheld the face of the magnificum, and I did not turn away.
Rick Yancey
They were afraid the longer we pretended to be human, the more human we would become.”“And who would want that?”“I didn’t think I would,” he admits. “Until I became one.”“When you…‘woke up’ in Evan?”He shakes his head and says simply, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world, “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.Somebody might say that I’m not the only one lying in the enemy’s arms.I am humanity, but who is Evan Walker? Human and Other. Both and neither. By loving me, he belongs to no one.He doesn’t see it that way.
Rick Yancey
There are some we cannot help but take an instant dislike to.
Rick Yancey
I've always sucked at games of chance. Always hated them for that reason.
Rick Yancey
She hated him and loved him, longed for him and loathed him, and cursed herself for feeling anything at all
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
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 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
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
Sometimes in my tent, last at night, I think I can hear the stars scraping, against the sky.
Rick Yancey
Nothing makes us love something more than the loss of it.
Rick Yancey
I confessed I did not have an opinion; I was only thirteen, and this was my very first dismemberment.
Rick Yancey
...there are more terrifying monstrosities in the world than Anthropophagi. Monstrosities who, with a smile and a comforting pat on the head, are willing to sacrifice a child upon the altar of their own overweening ambition and pride.
Rick Yancey
The monstrous act by definition demands a monster.
Rick Yancey
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
With an enemy like that, who needs friends?
Rick Yancey
It kills me. The way he trusted. LIke the way we trusted before they came and blue the whole goddamned world apart. Trusted that when it got dark there would be light. Trusted that when you wanted a fucking strawberry Frappuccino you could plop your ass in the car, drive down the streed, and get yourself a fucking strawberry Frappuccino!
Rick Yancey
The bent but unbroken ones.
Rick Yancey
In the nineteenth century, The Romantics viewed Nature as benign, a glowing reflection of God's grace. Now we know better. Nature is brutal and, if it is feminine, she's not the kind of woman you can trust. Human beings may be her finest achievement yet, but when you get right down to brass tacks, we're meat. AIDS and organisms like streptococcus don't give a crap that we subdued the earth or produced a Shakespeare...
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
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
They made a major mistake," he blurted out, "the dumb bastards, when they didn't start by killing you first.""Benjamin Thomas Parish, that was the sweetest and most bizarre compliment anyone's ever given me."I kissed him on the cheek. He kissed me on the mouth."You know," I whispered, "a year ago, I would have sold my soul for that."He shook his head. "Not worth it." And, for one-ten thousandth of a second, all of it fell away, the despair and grief and anger and pain and hunger, and the old Ben Parish rose from the dead. The eyes that impaled. The smile that slayed. In another moment, he would fade, slide back into the new Ben, the one called Zombie, and I understood something I hadn't before: He was dead, the object of my schoolgirl desires, just as the schoolgirl who desired him was dead.
Rick Yancey
The human brain has a marvelous capacity to screen and sort experience, protecting itself against the unbearable.
Rick Yancey
The shadow raised its arm high in the air and I knew - I knew before I heard my name - that he'd found me again, keeper of the promise he couldn't make, the one I had marked with my blood and who had marked me with his tears, a Silencer all right, my silencer, stumbling toward me in the impossibly pure light of a late winter's sunrise promising spring.
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
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
This is what the Others have done to us. You can’t band together to fight without trust. And without trust, there was no hope. How do you rid the Earth of humans? Rid the humans of their humanity.
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
You can't band together to fight without trust. And without trust, there was no hope.
Rick Yancey
Beyond their immaculate design, the reason sharks rule the ocean is their complete indifference to everything except feeding, procreation, and defending their territory. The shark does not love. It feels no empathy. It trusts nothing. It lives in perfect harmony with its environment because it has no aspirations or desires. And no pity. A shark feels no sorrow, no remorse, hopes for nothing, dreams of nothing, has no illusions about itself or anything beyond itself.
Rick Yancey
Do you believe in God, Evan?”“Sure I do.”“I don’t. I mean, I don’t know. I did before the Others came. Or thought I did, when I thought about it at all. And then they came and…” I have to stop for a second to collect myself. “Maybe there’s a God. Sammy thinks there is. But he also thinks there’s a Santa Claus. Still, every night I said his prayer with him, and it didn’t have anything to do with me. It was about Sammy and what he believed, and if you could have seen him take that fake soldier’s hand and follow him onto that bus…”I’m losing it, and it doesn’t matter to me much. Crying is always easier in the dark. Suddenly my cold hand is blanketed by Evan’s warmer one, and his palm is as soft and smooth as the pillowcase beneath my cheek.“It kills me,” I sob. “The way he trusted. Like the way we trusted before they came and blew the whole goddamned world apart. Trusted that when it got dark there would be light. Trusted that when you wanted a fucking strawberry Frappuccino you could plop your ass in the car, drive down the street, and get yourself a fucking strawberry Frappuccino! Trusted…
Rick Yancey
His body is pressed against my back, his arm is wrapped protectively around my waist, his breath a delicious tickle against my neck. The room is very cold; it would be nice to climb under the covers, but I don’t want to move. I don’t want him to move. I run my fingers along his bare forearm, remembering the warmth of his lips, the silkiness of his hair between my fingers. 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.I can’t trust him. I have to trust him.I can’t stay with him. I can’t leave him behind.
Rick Yancey
Too many people say something when they really have nothing to say.
Rick Yancey
We have just discovered our dear colleague butchered in a hotel room, and you wish to discuss literature?
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
To hold on, you have to find something you're willing to die for.
Rick Yancey
Nothing is more painful than the loneliness of being with someone who is never completely there.
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
Is this how humanity waves good-bye?Hell no.
Rick Yancey
I brought Sammy inside and put him to bed. Said his prayer with him. “‘Now I lay me down to sleep…’” To me, just random noise. Gibberish. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but I felt that, when it came to God, there was a broken promise in there somewhere.
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
You can only call someone crazy if there's someone else who's normal.
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
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
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
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
She's hurt and still imagines I'd worry about him for even a second ? I touch her shoulder. Her touch her shoulder. Her dark hair brushes the back of my hand. Her dark eyes shine. Their brightness goes all the way down."You found me," she says.I kneel beside her. I take her hand. "I found you"."My back is broken,"she says. "I can't walk."I slide my arms beneath her. "I'll carry you".
Rick Yancey
Pain is necessary. Pain is life. Without pain there can be no joy.
Rick Yancey
We are humanity, the banner read. Wrong. We’re pale reflections of it, weak shadows, distant echoes.
Rick Yancey