Rick Yancey Quotes

This place can't be heaven, it doesn't have the right vibe.

It is a very thin line between us and the abyss, Will Henry,' he said. 'For most it is like that line out there, where the sea meets the sky. They see it. They cannot deny the evidence of their eyes, but they never cross it. They cannot cross it; though they chase it for a thousand years, it will forever stay where it is. Do you realize it took our species more than ten millennia to realize that simple fact? That the line is unreachable, that we live on a ball and not on a plate? Most of us do, anyway. Men like Jacob Torrance and John Kearns ... Those kinds of men still live on a plate. Do you understand what I mean?'
I nodded. I thought I did.

By killing us, they showed us the idiocy of stuff. The guy who owned this BMW? He's in the same place as the woman who owned that Kia.

A healthy sense of the ironic is the best way to remain sane in a world that often isn't; I highly recommend it.

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

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

You never lose those who love you because love is a constant. Love endures.

He showed me how enormous the emptiness was by filling it.

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.

It is hard ... to think about those things we do not think about.

It's over. It's never over. It isn't a line from that night to this day; it's a circle.

Despair is a wholly selfish response to fortune's slings and arrows.

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

The Eye will take care of her.

Into the counter behind her; her stick-thin arms fly into the air. I whip to my right, toward Razor, in time to see his chest blown apart by the kneeling recruit's round.

Chess wasn't invented. It was discovered." "Like America?" "Like mathematics.

Five men and two women, strangers to one another on the eve of that final growing season, now bound by the unspoken promise that the least of them was greater than the sum of all of them.

The lion crouches in the tall grass. The gazelle sniffs the air. The awful stillness before the strike.

Promises are the only currency left. They must be spent wisely.

Floods, fires, earthquakes, disease, starvation, betrayal, isolation, murder.
What doesn't kill us sharpens us. Hardens us. Schools us.

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.

My mind didn't register the sounds at first. The woods echoed with the staccato bursts of automatic weapons and people screaming, but it wasn't computing, like Crisco's head snapping back and the way he flopped into the gray dust like every bone in his body had suddenly turned into Jell-O, the way his killer had swung around in a perfectly executed pirouette with the barrel of the gun flashing in the sunlight.

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

He had given in to hope, and that will kill you. It kills you before you die. Long before you die.

There are some we cannot help but take an instant dislike to.

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.

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?

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

I made a promise. The kind of promise you don't break because, if you break it you've broken part of yourself, maybe the most important part.

It's been a long time since humans were prey animals. A hundred thousand years or so. But buried deep in our genes the memory remains: the awareness of the gazelle, the instinct of the antelope. The wind whispers through the grass. A shadow flits between the trees. And up speaks the little voice that goes. Shhhh, it's close now. Close.

The experience was like running into someone you hadn't seen since middle school - you recognize them, but what you really notice is the ways they've changed. They don't match your memory of how they should look and for a second you're thrown off, because your memory of them IS them.

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.

So there you go. You can love the good in us and hate the bad, but the bad is in us, too. Without it, we wouldn't be us.

I have one half of one half second to decide.

Don't decide how you feel about something before you try it.

There's nothing fated in our stars. No meant-to-be in any of it. We are accidental people occupying an accidental planet in an accidental universe. And that's okay. These seven billion billion atoms are good with that.

Spring. Blooms break forth from the startled earth. The sky laughs. The trees, abashed, dress themselves in verdant green. And the heavens are lush with starts. Redeem the time, the stars sing down. Redeem the dream.
And the boy waking in the land of broken rocks, the dry land wet with spring rain, waking in the place where two dreams cross
the dream where seeds grow into trees of gold and the dream of the box that he cannot open.

It kills me. The way he trusted. LIke the way we trusted before they came and blue 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 streed, and get yourself a fucking strawberry Frappuccino!

So, I thought, this is how dead people see the world.

Forgiveness is not born out of innocence or ignorance. Forgiveness is born of love.

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

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.

The kind of eyes you search to find something and only come up with two possibilities: either what's there is so deep you can't see it, or there's nothing there at all.

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

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.

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.

Half the world prays they will be given what they deserve, and the other half that they will not.

I bet you popped out of your momma with a gun in one hand and a doughnut in the other.

My mother looked at my dad and didn't know him. Didn't know where she was. Who she was. What was happening to her. There was this, like, permanent, creepy smile, cracked lips pulled back from bleeding gums, her teeth stained with blood. Sounds came out of her mouth, but they weren't words. The place in her brain that made words was packed with virus, and the virus didn't know language - it knew only how to make more of itself. And then my mother died in a fury of jerks and gargled screams, her uninvited guests rocketing out of every orifice, because she was done, they'd used her up, time to turn off the lights and find a new home.

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.

The doctor,' Erasmus echoed. 'They call him that - but what exactly is he a doctor of?'
The grotesque, I might have answered. The bizarre. The unspeakable. Instead I gave him the same answer the doctor had given me when I'd asked him not long after my arrival at the house on Harrington Lane. 'Philosophy,' I said with little conviction.

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.

Let no one despair,
even though in the darkest night
the last star of hope my disappear.
Friedrich Schiller

The 12th System can protect you from the pain that afflicts your body, but it's helpless against the pain that crushes your soul.

In the name of all that is holy, tell me why God felt the need to make a hell. It seems so redundant.

We're all dead ... Some of us are just a little further along than others.

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

I'm hoping to pass for one of Vosch's tween recruits, but I probably look more like GI Joe's little sister playing dress up

All things do happen for a reason ... Is this not the foundation of our faith? You are here-all of us-because we are but part of a plan prepared before the foundations of the earth. It is our humble duty to discern our role in that plan.

8:30 P.M.: Personal time. Free of Reznik at last. We wash our jumpsuits, shine our boots, scrub the barracks floor and the latrine, clean our rifles, pass around dirty magazines, and swap other contraband like candy and chewing gum. We play cards and bust each other's nuts and complain about Reznik. We share the day's rumors and tell bad jokes and push back against the silence inside our own heads, the place where the never-ending voiceless scream rises like the superheated air above a lava flow. Inevitably

Love may be nothing more than a complex interaction of hormones, conditioned behavior, and positive reinforcement, but try writing a poem or song about that.

We are hunters all. We are, all of us, monstrumologists. And Pellinore Warthrop was the best of us, for he had found the courage to turn and face the most terrifying monster of all.

If you wanted to separate humans from their humanity...killing laughter would be a good place to start.

You called her a Stork
No you did
What did you call her
A Katerina
Why?
That was her name

That's the way of every human catastrophe. The douchebag is nearly indestructible.

Because love is the most dangerous weapon in the world. It's more unstable than uranium.

To truly pass, you must overcome what cannot be overcome.

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

The first rule: Trust no one. Which leads to the second rule: The only way to stay alive as long as possible is to stay alone as long as possible. Now I've broken both.

I'm a little panicky when I realize he's not here. It's a lot easier to push down my doubt when he's with me. When I can see those eyes the color of melted chocolate and hear his deep voice that falls over me like a warm blanket on a cold night.

Love has a way of making us stupid, Will Henry. It blinds us to certain blatant realities, in this case the spectacularly high mortality rate among monstrumologists. Rarely do we live past forty - my father and von Helrung being the exceptions.

People change spouses more often than they clean out closets. And every time they say, 'This is the one. This is the person I'm going to spend eternity with.' Then forty or fifty years go by and you're just sick of each other, utterly sick, and it's on to the next 'true love.' My question is what good is eternity if you are eternally falling in and out of love?

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.

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

Everything's broken?" he asked Cassie. "Everything?"
"No, not everything, Sams," she answered. "Not this."
She took his hand and put it against his chest, and his pounding heart pushed fiercely against his open palm.
"Unbroken," she said.

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.

He kept me from dying. Fed me, bathed me, protected me. He helped me to get strong. He even taught me how to kill. With an enemy like that, who needs friends?

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

Never mind that he saved your ass more times than you can remember, or that he could have killed you a hundred times over, or that there's something about him, something tormented and sad and terribly, terribly lonely, like he was the last person on Earth, not the girl shivering in a sleeping bag, hugging a teddy bear in a world gone quiet.

Though I understand the theology behind it, the image does not bring me peace; it makes me feel sorry for the lion. It strips him of his essence, the fundamental part of his being. A lion that does not behave as a lion i snot a lion. It isn't even the lion's opposite. It's a mockery of a lion.

I thought of the unblemished thing, the thing that lasts, and I thought the only thing with the power to save us also had the power to slay us.

'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.

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.

Bear proves that true love doesn't have to be complicated - or even reciprocated.

I grab his hand and head for the tunnel, keeping my shoulders back and my head up, because skulking toward the nearest exit like Shaggy and Scooby tinkle-toeing is sure to draw attention. I even bark at some kids to get out of the way. If someone tries to stop us, I won't shoot them. I'll explain that the kid is sick and I'm getting him to a doctor before he pukes all over himself and everybody else. If they don't buy my story, then I shoot them.

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.

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.

I could feel the tug of morbid curiosity, like an outgoing tide pulling on a swimmer, urging me to look again. I

There's no bottom to this crap. The more you dig, the further down it goes.

We have survived the death of our childhood. We are soldiers now, maybe the last soldiers who will ever fight, the Earth's final and only hope, united as one in the spirit of vengeance.

Well, what do we have here? What have they sent us from central casting - is this a hobbit? Are you a magical creature from a storybook realm come to enchant me with your dark magic?

I couldn't outrun them. I couldn't outgun them. Maybe I could outsmart them.

In the nineteenth century, The Romantics viewed Nature as benign, a glowing reflection of God's grace. Now we know better. Nature is brutal and, if it is feminine, she's not the kind of woman you can trust. Human beings may be her finest achievement yet, but when you get right down to brass tacks, we're meat. AIDS and organisms like streptococcus don't give a crap that we subdued the earth or produced a Shakespeare ...

I feel his kiss more intensely now, in the darkness of the room where his sister died. In the quiet of the house where his family died. In the stillness of the world where the life we knew before the Arrival died. He tastes my tears before I can feel them. Where there would be tears, his kiss. "I didn't save you, " he whispered, lips tickling my eyelashes. "You saved me." He repeats it over and over until we fall asleep pressed against each other, his voice in my ear, my tears in his mouth, "You saved me.

We call Chess the game of Kings, because through chess, we learn how to rule kings

In fact, I can't even tell if I'm breathing. That's number one on the "How do I know if I'm alive?" checklist.

That's my big problem. That's it! Before the Arrival,guys like Evan Walker never looked twice at me, much less shot wild game for me and washed my hair. They never grabbed me by the back of the neck like the airbrushed model on his mother's paperback,abs a-clenching, pecs a-popping. My eyes have never been looked into, or my chin raised to bring my lips within an inch of theirs. I was the girl in the background, the just-friend,or -worse- the friend of a just-friend, the you-sit-next-to-her-in-geometry-but-can't-remember-her-name girl.

He would bear any burden, endure any hardship, suffer any torment if that suffering added a single moment to her life.

That was a good thing a bad thing or a thing that was neither good nor bad, but whatever it was, good, bad or neither , depended on your point of

The truth is you don't know shit. I don't know shit. Nobody knows shit.