Rick Yancey Quotations | Page 2

After another half second, he's locked me in a bear hug, crushing me into his chest and lifting my feet a couple inches off the ground as I kick furiously with my heels, twisting my head back and forth, snapping at his forearm with my teeth. And the whole time his lips tickling the delicate skin of my ear. "Cassie. Don't. Cassie..." "Let...me...go." "That's been the whole problem. I can't.

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

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

Why did they come billions of miles just to stare at us? It's rude.

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.

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.

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.

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

I'm one, too," he said. "What?" He spit a wad of blood and mucus into the dirt. "A virgin." What a shock. "What makes you think I'm a virgin?" I asked. "You wouldn't have hit me if you weren't.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

When the moment comes to stop running from your past, to turn around and face the thing you thought you could not face--the moment when your life teeters between giving up and getting up--when that moment comes, and it always comes, if you can't get up and you can't give up either, here's what you do: Crawl.

Time for the world to end.

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?

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 had it all wrong," he says. "Before I found you, I thought the only way to hold on was to find something to live for. It isn't. To hold on, you have to find something you're willing to die for.

I am a shark, Cassie," he says slowly, drawing the words out, as if he might be speaking to me for the last time. Looking into my eyes with tears in his, as if he's seeing me for the last time. "A shark who dreamed he was a man.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Because promises matter. They matter now more than ever.

But hope is no less realistic than despair. It is still our choice whether to live in light or lie down in darkness.

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.

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

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

You can only call someone crazy if there’s someone else who’s normal. Like good and evil. If everything was good, then nothing would be good.

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.

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

There's a hero in every heart waiting for the dragon to come out.

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.

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

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.

You are the nest. You are the hatchling. You are the chrysalis. You are the progeny. You are the rot that falls from stars. You may not understand what I mean. You will.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

But if I'm it, the last of my kind, the last page of human history, like hell I'm going to let the story end this way. 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 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.

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

He barely knew I existed. I knew some of the same people he knew, but I was a girl in the background, several degrees of seperation removed.

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.

Afterward I told his widow, "Your husband is dead, but at least he died laughing.' I think she took some comfort in that. It is the second-best way to die, Will Henry." He did not say what the best way was.

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

Have you fallen in love, Will Henry?" "That's stupid." "What is? Love, or my question?" "I don't know." "You don't know? You've tried that trick once. What do you suppose it will work better the second time?" "I don't love her. She bothers me." "You have just defined the very thing you denied.

There are those who labor in the darkness, that the rest of us might live in the light.

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.

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

There are things that are too terrible to remember, and there are things that are almost too wonderful to recall.

To hell with monsters and to hell with men. There is no difference to me.

The spring rains woke the dormant tillers, and bright green shoots sprang from the moist earth and rose like sleepers stretching after a long nap. As spring gave way to summer, the bright green stalks darkened, became tan, turned golden brown. The days grew long and hot. Thick towers of swirling black clouds brought rain, and the brown stems glistened in the perpetual twilight that dwelled beneath the canopy. The wheat rose and the ripening heads bent in the prairie wind, a rippling curtain, an endless, undulating sea that stretched to the horizon.

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

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

Perhaps God waits for us to be empty, so he may fill us with himself.

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.