Rick Yancey Quotes

God doesn't call the equipped, son. God equips the called. And you have been called.

The minute we decide that one person doesn´t matter anymore, they´ve won.

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.

We are very much like them: indiscriminate killers, ruled by drives little acknowledged and less understood, mindlessly territorial and murderously jealous - the only significant difference being that they have yet to master our expertise in hypocrisy, the gift of our superior intellect that enables us to slaughter one another in droves, more often than not under the auspices of an approving god!

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.

That's what you do when the curtain is falling--you give the line that the audience wants to hear.

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.

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!

Dr. Warthrop chopped off my finger with a butcher knife.

Tampons. I’m constantly worrying about my stash and if I’ll be able to find more.

She hated him and loved him, longed for him and loathed him, and cursed herself for feeling anything at all

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

It's an either/or world now.

Because we will die, but at least we will die unbroken.

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.

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.

Some things you don't have to promise. You just do.

Soon I will fall asleep and I will wake from this terrible dream. The endless night will fall, and I will rise. I long for that night. I do not fear it. I have had my fill of fear. I have stared too long into the abyss, and now the abyss stares back at me.

There are times when fear is not our enemy. There are times when fear is our truest, sometimes only, friend.

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.

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.

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.

A moment comes in war when the last line must be crossed. The line that separates what you hold dear from what total war demands. If he couldn't cross that line, the battle was over, and he was lost. His heart, the war. Her face, the battlefield. With a cry only he could hear, the hunter turned. And ran.

Still, you tend to believe what you always believed, think what you always thought, expect what you always expected

Do you know how to tell who the enemy is, Cassie?

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.

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.

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.

She looks at me out of the side of her uncovered eye. "Chess, Zombie: defending yourself from the move that hasn't happened yet. Does it matter that he doesn't light up through our eyepieces? That he missed us when he could have taken us own? If two possibilities are equally probable but mutually exclusive, which one matters the most? Which one do you bet your life on?

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.

Sci-Fi is the genre that explored both possibilities: the end of our existential crisis and the end of our existence. My novel, The 5th Wave, explores the latter scenario, because, frankly, I believe it represents the likeliest outcome of an extraterrestrial encounter. In short, if they're out there, we better hope they never find us.

It wasn't aliens that first made us gear up for war; it was our fellow humans.

It isn't that the lies are too beautiful to resist. It's that the truth is too hideous to face.

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.

It's hard to plan for what comes next when what comes next is not something you planned for.

I didn't save you," he whispers, lips tickling my eyelashes. "You saved me.

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

You're mortal, and only a mortal can afford to be romantic. When we conquered death, we murdered love.

Good God, man, what is that smell?" He eyed with disgust the doctor's filthy cloak. "Life," answered the doctor.

I have a very low tolerance for boredom and often think I would have missed out on books entirely if Id grown up in the Internet and video game age. Now I enjoy books for people of all ages, including children.

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.

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.

And then Evan Walker kisses me.

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.

Is it any wonder the power this man held over me - this man who did not run from his demons like most of us do, but embraced them as his own, clutching them to his heart in a choke-hold grip. He did not try to escape them by denying them or drugging them or bargaining with them. He met them where they lived, in the secret place most of us keep hidden. Warthrop was Warthrop down to the marrow of his bones, for his demons defined him; they breathed the breath of life into him; and without them, he would go down, as most of us do, into the purgatorial fog of a life unrealized.

When I wake up the next morning, there's a Hershey's Kiss sitting on the table beside me.

Climb onto my shoulders. I will not let you fall.

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.