Quotes by Rick Yancey

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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…

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.

You cant band together to fight without trust. And without trust, there was no hope.

In the 4th Wave, you cant trust that people are still people. But you can trust that your gun is still your gun.

This is what the Others have done to us. You can’t band together to fight without trust. And without trust, there was no hope. How do you rid the Earth of humans? Rid the humans of their humanity.

Ive decided to trust him, but like somebody once said, you cant 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. My problem is that buried box is like a scab I cant stop picking at.

The shadow raised its arm high in the air and I knew - I knew before I heard my name - that hed found me again, keeper of the promise he couldnt make, the one I had marked with my blood and who had marked me with his tears, a Silencer all right, my silencer, stumbling toward me in the impossibly pure light of a late winters sunrise promising spring.

My nose is broken, I said. Damn that Dumbo. Made me self-conscious.My ankles broken, he said.Then Ill come to you.

The human brain has a marvelous capacity to screen and sort experience, protecting itself against the unbearable.

They made a major mistake, he blurted out, the dumb bastards, when they didnt start by killing you first.Benjamin Thomas Parish, that was the sweetest and most bizarre compliment anyones ever given me.I kissed him on the cheek. He kissed me on the mouth.You know, I whispered, a year ago, I would have sold my soul for that.He shook his head. Not worth it. And, for one-ten thousandth of a second, all of it fell away, the despair and grief and anger and pain and hunger, and the old Ben Parish rose from the dead. The eyes that impaled. The smile that slayed. In another moment, he would fade, slide back into the new Ben, the one called Zombie, and I understood something I hadnt before: He was dead, the object of my schoolgirl desires, just as the schoolgirl who desired him was dead.

To conquer, you must endure not just your own suffering but the suffering of others. Indifference is the ultimate evolutionary achievement, the highest rung on natures ladder.

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 thats important.

In the nineteenth century, The Romantics viewed Nature as benign, a glowing reflection of Gods grace. Now we know better. Nature is brutal and, if it is feminine, shes 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, were meat. AIDS and organisms like streptococcus dont give a crap that we subdued the earth or produced a Shakespeare...

The bent but unbroken ones.