Rick Yancey Quotes

“You know how you can tell when you’re getting close to one? The smell. You can smell a town from miles away. It smells like smoke. And raw sewage.”

“They’re like a landlord who kicks out a deadbeat renter so he can get the house cleaned up for the new tenant; I think this has always been about getting the place ready.”

“I had it all wrong . . . 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.”

“Don’t you get it yet? The minute we decide that one person doesn’t matter anymore, they’ve won.”

“It isn’t about destroying our capability to fight so much as crushing our will to fight.”

“I’m a disease. That’s what I am to you.”

“I may be the last one, but I am the one still standing. I am the one not running, not staying, but facing.”

“If I am the last one, then I am humanity. And if this is humanity’s last war, then I am the battlefield.”

“I didn’t save you . . . You saved me.”

“Fear . . . For the gazelle, fear of being eaten. For the lion, fear of starvation. Fear is the chain that binds them together.”

“The war itself. How easy it was. How incredibly easy, even after all that we’d been through. Or maybe it was easy because of all we’d been through.”

“There’s a thousand ways this could go wrong and only one way for it to go right.”

“Don’t think a play ahead, or two or three. Think about this play, this step. Get it right one step at a time, and you’ll score.”

“When the moment comes to stop running from your past, to turn around and face the thing you thought you could not face… if you can’t get up and you can’t give up, here’s what you do: Crawl.”

“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.”

“Sometimes I think I might be the last human on Earth. Which means I’m the last human in the universe.”

“It’s hard to believe now, but my family, like the vast majority of people, went about our daily lives as if the most monumentally mind-blowing thing in human history wasn’t happening right over our heads.”

“He’d always thought they’d go home one day and everything would be like it was before they came . . . he didn’t understand that there was no going back, that what had happened was forever.”

“Am I crazy? Have I lost my mind? You can only call someone crazy if there’s someone else who’s normal. … Crazy: the new normal.”

“I wasn’t ready to admit the truth: It wasn’t just the world that changed with the coming of the Others. We changed. I changed.”