Quotes by Rick Yancey

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

I prefer not to call them demons. It demeans their nature. But isnt that what they are?We should pity them more than fear them Alfred. They were angels once.Yea, but didnt you say they rebelled against God? They got what they deserved.Perhaps. He sighed. Yet do we not all hope and pray that we ourselves escape that we truly deserve? None have fallen as far or as irrevocably as the outcasts of heaven. Did you not find them beautiful. ...They have gazed upon the very face of God, the face they will see no more for all eternity-and so I pity them. Even as I envy them for having seen it.

Understand their hatred is beyond human comprehension. They abhor the Creator and so also the creation. Whatever brings joy, whatever brings peace, whatever redeems the dark deed or relieves the terrors of the night and their enemies.

I do not mean to mock or ridicule your lifes 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 mens ears; yours live solely between your own.

Youre safe here. Perfectly safe. That phrase still haunts me. Haunts me because its always been a lie. It was a lie before they came and its still a lie. Youre never perfectly safe. No human being on Earth ever is or ever was. To live is to risk your life, your heart, everything. Otherwise, youre just a walking corpse. Youre a zombie.

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

Wed stared into Deaths eyes and Death blinked first.

I am a shark. A shark who dreamed he was a man.

You’re the mayfly, he murmurs. And then Evan Walker kisses me. Holding my hand across his chest, his other hand sliding across my neck, his touch feathery soft, sending a shiver that travels down my spine into my legs, which are having a hard time keeping me upright. I can feel his heart slamming against my palm and I can smell his breath and feel the stubble on his upper lip, a sandpapery contrast to the softness of his lips, and Evan is looking at me and I’m looking back at him.

I, um, I thought you might want this back.”I pull out the battered old teddy bear and hold it toward him. He frowns and shakes his head and doesn’t reach for it, and I feel like he’s punched me in the gut.Then my baby brother slaps that damned bear out of my hand and crushes his face against my chest, and beneath the odors of sweat and strong soap I can smell it, his smell, Sammy’s, my brother’s.

What is life without death, Beneficent? You of all people can answer that question. A never-ending orgy of emptiness that you stuff with meaningless activity. Everything is disposable, including your relationships--especially your your relationships.

For a being more advanced than I am, he sure has a hard time answering a simple question

I walked until the water lapped against my chest, and then I kept walking until it kissed the underside of my jaw. I was surprised how cold it was. I closed my eyes and ducked beneath the surface. Thee was the wind and the clouds and the pure pool and the boy beneath its unsettled surface, and the blood, the boys and monsters, defiling the pool.

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.

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.

The world will burn for a hundred years. Fire will consume the things we made from wood and plastic and rubber and cloth, then water and wind and time will chew the stone and steel into dust. How baffling it is that we imagined cities incinerated by alien bombs and death rays when all they needed was Mother Nature and time.

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

Zombie!” Sammy calls. “I knew it was you.”Zombie?“Where are you taking him?” Ben says to me in a deep voice. I don’t remember it being that deep. Is my memory bad or is he lowering it on purpose, to sound older?“Zombie, that’s Cassie,” Sam chides him. “You know—Cassie.”“Cassie?” Like he’s never heard the name before.“Zombie?” I say, because I really haven’t heard that name before.I pull off the cap, thinking it might help him recognize me, then immediately regret it. I know what my hair must look like.“We go to the same high school,” I say, drawing my fingers hastily through my chopped-off locks. “I sit in front of you in Honors Chemistry.”Ben shakes his head like he’s clearing out the cobwebs.Sammy goes, “I told you she was coming.”“Quiet, Sam,” I scold him.“Sam?” Ben asks.“My name is Nugget now, Cassie,” Sam informs me.“Well, sure it is.” I turn to Ben. “You know my brother.

I give her my best smile. Before the alien Armageddon happened, I was known for my smile. Not bragging too much, but I had to be careful never to smile while I drove. It had the capacity to blind oncoming traffic. But it has absolutely no effect on Ringer. She doesnt squint in its overwhelming luminescence. She doesnt even blink.

But the most wonderful thing of all, our highest achievement and the one thing for which I pray we will always be remembered, is stuffing wads of polyester into an anatomically incorrect, cartoonish ideal of one of natures most fearsome predators for no other reason than to soothe a child.