Rick Yancey

Poets never die, I thought. They just fail in the end.

— Rick Yancey

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 hadn’t before: He was dead, the object of my schoolgirl desires, just as the schoolgirl who desired him was dead.

— Rick Yancey

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.

— Rick Yancey

You never know when the truth will come home. You can’t choose the time. The time chooses you.

— Rick Yancey

How baffling it is that we imagined cities incinerated by alien bombs and death rays when all they really needed was Mother Nature and time.

— Rick Yancey

You never know when the truth will come home. You can’t choose the time. The time chooses you.

— Rick Yancey

But if I'm it, the last of my kind, the last page of human history, like hell I'm going to let the story end this way. I may be the last one, but I am the one still standing. I am the one turning to face the faceless hunter in the woods on an abandoned highway. I am the one not running but facing. Because if I am the last one, then I am humanity. And if this is humanity's last war, then I am the battlefield.

— Rick Yancey

We’re here, and then we’re gone, and it’s not about the time we’re here, but what we do with the time.

— Rick Yancey

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.

— Rick Yancey