Rick Yancey Quotations

'The 5th Wave' is sci-fi, but I tried very hard to ground the story in very human terms and in those universal themes that transcend genre. How do we define ourselves? What, exactly, does it mean to be human? What remains after everything we trust, everything we believe in and rely upon, has been stripped away?

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.

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 theyre out there, we better hope they never find us.

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.

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?

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.

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.

The aliens of 'The 5th Wave' are not the aliens we've imagined. Not the aliens we'd like to attack us.

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.

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.

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.

When civilizations collide, it usually isn't the more primitive one that prevails.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The way we learn to write is the way we learn to talk: We listen to others and start mimicking speech, and that's how we come to become speakers. Writers you admire, you admire the way they plot, you admire the way they create a character, you admire the way they put a sentence together, those are the writers you should be reading.

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.

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.

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.

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.

His heart, the war. Her face, the battlefield.

'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.

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.

I don't care what the stars say about how small we are. One, even the smallest, weakest, most insignificant one, matters.

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.

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.

And then Evan Walker kisses me.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

In case you're an alien and you're reading this: BITE ME.

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

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.

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.

And if humanity is the last war, then I am the battlefield.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

When you look death in the eye and death blinks first, nothing seems impossible.

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!

Poets never die, I thought. They just fail in the end.

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

The world is a clock winding down.

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?

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

A man lies upon the floor, spreads his arms, and transforms himself into a ship of a thousand sails.

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

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.

It's like a cockroach working up a plan to defeat the shoe on its way down to crush it.

Are you okay?" I (Cassie) call up to him. "Um. Define okay." (Ben) "Okay means you're not bleeding to death." "I'm okay.

Hold on tight, Sam." He puts me in a choke hold. "Ahhh," I gasp. "Not that tight.

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

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

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?

If the world breaks a million and one promises, can you trust the million and second?

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.

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

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!

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.

I was woefully ignorant in the social graces. I was being raised, after all, by Pellinore Warthrop.

Nothing makes us love something more than the loss of it.

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

It's an either/or world now.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Cruelty isn't a personality trait. Cruelty is a habit.

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

Self-pity is egotism undiluted, after all—self-centeredness in its purest form.

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.

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.

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

The monstrous act by definition demands a monster.

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 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!

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?

Perhaps that is our doom, our human curse, to never really know one another. We erect edifices in our minds about the flimsy framework of word and deed, mere totems of the true person, who, like the gods to whom the temples were built, remains hidden. We understand our own construct; we know our own theory; we love our own fabrication. Still . . . does the artifice of our affection make our love any less real?

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.

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.

But monsters, I now know, come in all shapes and sizes, and only their appetite for human flesh defines them.

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

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.

Sarcasm doesn't appear to work on him. If that's true, I'm in trouble: It's my normal mode of communication.

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.

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.

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