Top 167 Quotes & Sayings by Rick Yancey

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.

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

Sci-Fi is the genre that explored both possibilities: the end of our existential crisis and the end of our existence. My novel, 'The 5th Wave,' explores the latter scenario, because, frankly, I believe it represents the likeliest outcome of an extraterrestrial encounter. In short, if they're out there, we better hope they never find us.

My first favourite book was 'Are You My Mother?' A picture book about a lost bird. After that my favourites changed almost yearly. I loved everything by Roald Dahl, but my favourite was probably 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.' A librarian gave me a first edition of that book, which I treasure.

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.

I got a very late start at fatherhood. I'm a late bloomer in general. It took me seven years to get through four years of college. I was five years away from 40 before I had a family, and I had never been around kids much at all. All of a sudden, I was around three boys all the time.

I always feel trepidation at the beginning of every project. I worry about so many things. Time to get it right, the skill to do it justice, the will to finish. I also worry about more mundane things, like what if my computer crashes and I've forgotten to back up the manuscript?

The aliens of 'The 5th Wave' are not the aliens we've imagined. Not the aliens we'd like to attack us.

I really kill myself on titles, although 'The 5th Wave' seems like an obvious title, doesn't it? You don't know how long that took me.

Human beings are remarkably resilient. When you think about it, our species has been teetering upon the edge of the existential cliff since Hiroshima. In short, we endure.

'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.

'The 5th Wave' is sci-fi, but I tried very hard to ground the story in very human terms and in those universal themes that transcend genre. How do we define ourselves? What, exactly, does it mean to be human? What remains after everything we trust, everything we believe in and rely upon, has been stripped away?

Ever since I was young, 14 or 15, I wondered if you could write a book that combined the visceral thrill of watching a movie with the total immersion you feel when you're inside a good book. And I had some success as a screenwriter before I began writing books.

I have a very low tolerance for boredom and often think I would have missed out on books entirely if I'd grown up in the Internet and video game age. Now I enjoy books for people of all ages, including children.

The way we learn to write is the way we learn to talk: We listen to others and start mimicking speech, and that's how we come to become speakers. Writers you admire, you admire the way they plot, you admire the way they create a character, you admire the way they put a sentence together, those are the writers you should be reading.

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.

It's been a while since I've written a novel aimed at the adult market, but I never sit down and say to myself, 'Okay, now I'm going to write something for us old folks.' I get gripped by an idea, and I go where the idea takes me.

My foray into young adult lit was by no means planned. I wrote the first 'Alfred Kropp' book as an adult novel, which everyone loved but no one would publish - until I changed my protagonist from a thirty-something P.I. into a 15-year-old kid. After that, it was off to the races, and I am so glad.

Being born at the tag-end of the baby boom, I was destined (or doomed, depending on how you look at it) to fall in love with sci-fi. It was one of my first literary loves, as a matter of fact.

I've loved sci-fi and speculative fiction since I was a kid. It was inevitable I'd try my hand at it at some point.

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.

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

That's what you do when the curtain is falling--you give the line that the audience wants to hear.

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'd stared into the face of Death, and Death blinked first. You'd think that would make us feel brave and invincible. It didn't.

Perhaps that is our doom, our human curse, to never really know one another. We erect edifices in our minds about the flimsy framework of word and deed, mere totems of the true person, who, like the gods to whom the temples were built, remains hidden. We understand our own construct; we know our own theory; we love our own fabrication. Still . . . does the artifice of our affection make our love any less real?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some things you can never leave behind. They don't belong to the past. They belong to you.

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.

Nothing makes us love something more than the loss of it.

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

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.

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.

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

The monstrous act by definition demands a monster.

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.

It isn't that the lies are too beautiful to resist. It's that the truth is too hideous to face.

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

Even the most sensitive person can get used to even the most insensitive thing. Cruelty isn’t a personality trait. Cruelty is a habit.

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.

Good God, man, what is that smell?" He eyed with disgust the doctor's filthy cloak. "Life," answered the doctor.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I was a slave to something he believed to be silly and superstitious: the idea that all life was worth defending and that nothing justified surrender to the forces of destruction.