Samantha > Samantha's Quotes

“As long as you draw breath anywhere -here or ten thousands miles from here- I will love you. I can't help loving you, so I choose to hate you...to make my love bearable.”
― Rick Yancey, The Curse of the Wendigo

“Memories can bring comfort to the old and infirm, but memories can also be implacable foes, a malicious army of temporal ghosts forever pillaging the long-sought-after peace of our twilight years.”
― Rick Yancey, The Monstrumologist

“He knew the truth. Yes, my dear child, he would undoubtedly tell a terrified toddler tremulously seeking succor, monsters are real. I happen to have one hanging in my basement.”
― Rick Yancey, The Monstrumologist

“Good God, man, what is that smell?" He eyed with disgust the doctor's filthy cloak.
"Life," answered the doctor.”
― Rick Yancey, The Curse of the Wendigo

“How oft do they rescue or ruin us, through whimsy or design or a combination of both, the adults to whom we entrust our care!”
― Rick Yancey, The Monstrumologist

“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?”
― Rick Yancey, The Monstrumologist

“Could there be irony crueler than this? How, upon his rescue, the truth had brought him here, to a house for the mad, for only a madman believes what every child knows to be true: There are monsters that lie in wait under our beds.”
― Rick Yancey, The Monstrumologist

“There are those who labor in the darkness, that the rest of us might live in the light.”
― Rick Yancey, The Isle of Blood

“There are times when fear is not our enemy. There are times when fear is our truest, sometimes only, friend.”
― Rick Yancey, The Monstrumologist

“We are very much like them: indiscriminate killers, ruled by drives little acknowledged and less understood, mindlessly territorial and murderously jealous - the only significant difference being that they have yet to master our expertise in hypocrisy, the gift of our superior intellect that enables us to slaughter one another in droves, more often than not under the auspices of an approving god!”
― Rick Yancey, The Monstrumologist

“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.”
― Rick Yancey, The Curse of the Wendigo

“Perhaps God waits for us to be empty, so he may fill us with himself.”
― Rick Yancey, The Isle of Blood

“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.”
― Rick Yancey, The Isle of Blood

“But hope is no less realistic than despair. It is still our choice whether to live in light or lie down in darkness.”
― Rick Yancey, The Isle of Blood

“Please, do not leave me, Will Henry. I would not survive it. You were nearly right. What Mr. Kendall was, I am always on the brink of becoming. And you - I do not pretend to know how or even why - but you pull me back from the precipice. You are the one... You are the one thing that keeps me Human.”
― Rick Yancey, The Isle of Blood

“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.”
― Rick Yancey, The Isle of Blood

“Back into your box, anonymous Yorick, with your sutured eyes and frozen scream! The indignity of your internment is no worse than ours.”
― Richard Yancey, The Monstrumologist

“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.”
― Rick Yancey, The Monstrumologist

“...Grimacing, I plunged a hand into the fouled water to clear the clog, morbid curiosity drawing my youthful eyes to the gray globs of gore floating upon the surface. It was not horror that seized my imagination so much as wonder: sixty years of dreams and desires, hunger and hope, love and longing, blasted away in a single explosive instant, mind and brain. The mind of Erasmus Gray was gone; the remnants of its vessel floated, as light and insubstantial as popcorn, in the water. Which fluffy bit held your ambition, Erasmus Gray? Which speck your pride? Ah, how absurd the primping and preening of our race! Is it not the ultimate arrogance to believe we are more than is contained in our biology? What counterarguments may be put forth, what valid objections raised, to the claim of Ecclesiastes, "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity"?”
― Rick Yancey, The Monstrumologist

“A child has little defense against the sight of a parent laid low. Parents, like the earth beneath our feet and the sun above our heads, are immutable objects, eternal and reliable. If one should fall, who might vouch the sun itself won't fall, burning, into the sea?”
― Rick Yancey, The Monstrumologist

“I assure you, Constable Morgan, I am quite sane, as I understand the word, perhaps the sanest person in this room, for I suffer from no illusions. I have freed myself, you see, from the pretense that burdens most men. Much like our prey, I do not impose order where there is none; I do not pretend there is any more than what there is, or that you and I are anything more than what we are. That is the essence of their beauty, Morgan, the aboriginal purity of their being, and why I admire them.”
― Rick Yancey, The Monstrumologist

“Our enemy is fear. Blinding, reason-killing fear. Fear consumes the truth and poisons all the evidence, leading us to false assumptions and irrational conclusions.”
― Rick Yancey, The Monstrumologist

“What of men? I can't think of anything more banal. I have no doubt — no doubt whatsoever — that once it has obtained the means to do so, the species will wipe itself off the face of the earth. There is no mystery to it; it is our nature. Oh, one might delve into the particulars, but really, what can we say about the species that invented murder? What can we say?”
― Rick Yancey, The Isle of Blood

“She hated him and loved him, longed for him and loathed him, and cursed herself for feeling anything at all”
― Rick Yancey, The Isle of Blood

“None of it had prepared him, however, for this naked confrontation with gross injustice, this horrific reminder that despite all the honors with which we shower ourselves, we are, ultimately, fodder, mere meat for the inferior, soulless things of which I dreamt the night before, no less than us the Creator's children." - The Monstrumologist”
― Rick Yancey

“I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Not all those who wander are lost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Tell him that we fucking reprogrammed reality. Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system and that prayers are just so much fucking spam.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“And you'd think that killing people would make them like you, but it doesn't. It just- it just makes them dead.”
― Joe Walker (as Voldemort in AVPM)