Rick Yancey Quotes

You never know when the truth will come home. You can't choose the time. The time chooses you.

The world is a clock winding down.

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.

Sometimes in my tent, late at night, I think I can hear the stars scraping against the sky.

The beautiful wooden board on a stand in my father's study. The gleaming ivory pieces. The stern king. The haughty queen. The noble knight. The pious bishop. And the game itself, the way each piece contributed its individual power to the whole. It was simple. It was complex. It was savage; it was elegant. It was a dance; it was a war. It was finite and eternal. It was life.

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.

The kid who didn't go back when he should have and now goes back when he shouldn't. The kid called Zombie, who made a promise, and if he breaks that promise, the war is over - not the big war, but the war that matters, the one in the battlefield of his heart. Because promises matter. They matter now more than ever.

The harder survival becomes, the more you want to pull together. And the more you want to pull together, the harder survival becomes.

And no answer when we sent our message. Something like, "Hello, welcome to Earth. Hope you enjoy your stay. Please don't kill us.

How do you rid the Earth of humans? Rid the humans of their humanity.

Adolphus is not at his desk. That means he is somewhere in the Monstrumarium, has gone home for the day, or is dead.

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.

I assure you, Constable Morgan, I am quite sane, as I understand the word, perhaps the sanest person in this room, for I suffer from no illusions. I have freed myself, you see, from the pretense that burdens most men. Much like our prey, I do not impose order where there is none; I do not pretend there is any more than what there is, or that you and I are anything more than what we are. That is the essence of their beauty, Morgan, the aboriginal purity of their being, and why I admire them.

So often the monsters that crowd our minds are nothing more than the strange and thoroughly alien progeny of our own fearful fantasies.

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.

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.

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.

What boy my age didn’t dream of fleeing the well-tended lawn and lamp-lit street for the untamed wilderness, where grand adventure awaited on the other side of the horizon, where the stars burned undimmed in the velvet sky above his head and the virgin ground lay untrodden beneath his feet?

What were they thinking? 'It's an alien apocalypse! Quick, grab the beer!

It isn't up to me to break his heart; that's time's job.

I would kill for a cheeseburger. Honestly. If I stumbled across someone eating a cheeseburger, I would kill them for it.

Even the most sensitive person can get used to even the most insensitive thing. Cruelty isn’t a personality trait. Cruelty is a habit.

There's an old saying about truth setting you free. Don't buy it. Sometimes the truth slams the cell door shut and throws a thousand bolts.

To show mercy is not naïve. To hold out against the end of hope is not stupidity or madness. It is fundamentally human. Of course... We are all doomed; we are all poisoned from our birth by the rot of stars. That does not mean we should succumb...to the seductive fallacy of despair, the dark tide that would drown us. You may think I'm stupid, you may call me a madman and a fool, but at least I stand upright in a fallen world.

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.

Time for the world to end.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Just because a man is a homicidal maniac doesn't make him wrong.

The monstrous act by definition demands a monster.

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.

Yes, my dear child, monsters are real. I happen to have one hanging in my basement.

We are slaves, all of us...Some are slaves to fear. Others are slaves to reason—or base desire. It is our lot to be slaves...and the question must be to what shall we owe our indenture? Will it be to truth or to falsehood, hope or despair, light or darkness? I choose to serve the light, even though that bondage often lies in darkness.

We are the clay, and you are Michelangelo. And we will be your masterpiece.

We are the hunters---and we are also the bait.

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.

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.

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

I'm here because they've killed almost all of us, but not all of us. And that's their mistake, son. That's the flaw in their plan. Because if you don't kill all of us at once, whoever's left are not going to be the weak ones. The strong ones- and only the strong ones- will survive. The bent but unbroken, if you know what I mean. People like me. And people like you.

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.

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

I am the one, Not Running, Not Staying, But FACING

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.

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.

Some things you can never leave behind. They don't belong to the past. They belong to you.