RYRick Yancey

146 collected words

Rick Yancey

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

I may be the last one, but I am the one still standing. I am the one turning to face the faceless hunter in the woods on an abandoned highway. I am the one not running, not staying, but facing. 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 / quote

02Undated

He was a finisher who could not finish. He was the heart of a hunter who lacked the heart to kill.In her journal she had written I am humanity, and something in those three words split him in two.She was the may fly, here for a day, then gone. She was the last star, burning bright in a sea of limitless black.Erase the human.In a burst of blinding light, the star Cassiopeia exploded and the world went black.Evan Walker had been undone.

Rick Yancey / quote

03Undated

Libraries, museums, universities, everything we designed and built over six thousand years. 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 / quote

04Undated

We are humanity, the banner read. Wrong. We’re pale reflections of it, weak shadows, distant echoes.

Rick Yancey / quote

05Undated

Pain is necessary. Pain is life. Without pain there can be no joy.

Rick Yancey / quote

06Undated

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 / quote

07Undated

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 / quote

08Undated

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 / quote

09Undated

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 / quote

10Undated

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 / quote

11Undated

You can only call someone crazy if there's someone else who's normal.

Rick Yancey / quote

12Undated

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 / quote

13Undated

Is this how humanity waves good-bye?Hell no.

Rick Yancey / quote

14Undated

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 / quote

15Undated

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 / quote

16Undated

Nothing is more painful than the loneliness of being with someone who is never completely there.

Rick Yancey / quote

17Undated

To hold on, you have to find something you're willing to die for.

Rick Yancey / quote

18Undated

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 / quote

19Undated

We have just discovered our dear colleague butchered in a hotel room, and you wish to discuss literature?

Rick Yancey / quote

20Undated

Too many people say something when they really have nothing to say.

Rick Yancey / quote

21Undated

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 / quote

22Undated

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 / quote

23Undated

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 / quote

24Undated

You can't band together to fight without trust. And without trust, there was no hope.

Rick Yancey / quote