Rick Yancey
But hope is no less realistic than despair. It is still our choice whether to live in light or lie down in darkness.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Mean
Sometimes in my tent, late at night, I think I can hear the stars scraping against the sky.Collection: Stars
So often the monsters that crowd our minds are nothing more than the strange and thoroughly alien progeny of our own fearful fantasies.Collection: Mind
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.Collection: Crazy
It's hard to plan for what comes next when what comes next is not something you planned for.Collection: Next
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.Collection: Mean
How do you rid the Earth of humans? Rid the humans of their humanity.Collection: Humanity
There's a hero in every heart waiting for the dragon to come out.Collection: Hero
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.Collection: Running
Nothing makes us love something more than the loss of it.Collection: Loss
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.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Stars
Some things you can never leave behind. They don't belong to the past. They belong to you.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Animal
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.Collection: Stars
There are times when fear is not our enemy. There are times when fear is our truest, sometimes only, friend.Collection: Monday
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.Collection: Stars
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.Collection: Thinking
That's what you do when the curtain is falling--you give the line that the audience wants to hear.Collection: Fall
It isn't that the lies are too beautiful to resist. It's that the truth is too hideous to face.Collection: Beautiful
The monstrous act by definition demands a monster.Collection: Monsters
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.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Running
I would kill for a cheeseburger. Honestly. If I stumbled across someone eating a cheeseburger, I would kill them for it.Collection: Eating
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 mineCollection: Eye
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Strong
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.Collection: Ears
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.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Confused
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.Collection: Mind
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.Collection: Crush
Do you know how to tell who the enemy is, Cassie?Collection: Enemy
His heart, the war. Her face, the battlefield.Collection: War
Cruelty isn't a personality trait. Cruelty is a habit.Collection: Personality
Sarcasm doesn't appear to work on him. If that's true, I'm in trouble: It's my normal mode of communication.Collection: 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.Collection: Doors
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.Collection: Giving
Climb onto my shoulders. I will not let you fall.Collection: Fall
Time for the world to end.Collection: World
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?Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: War
I didn't save you," he whispers, lips tickling my eyelashes. "You saved me.Collection: Eyelashes
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.Collection: Prayer
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.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Stupid