Emily > Emily's Quotes

“Some things you can never leave behind. They don't belong to the past. They belong to you.”
― Rick Yancey, The 5th Wave

“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.”
― Rick Yancey, The 5th Wave

“I've decided to trust him, but like somebody once said, you can't force yourself to trust. So you put all your doubts in a little box and bury it deep and then try to forget where you buried it. My problem is that buried box is like a scab I can't stop picking at.”
― Rick Yancey

“The fear that binds killer to prey and the bullet connecting both as if by a silver cord. Now I am the killer and the prey, a circe of a completely different kind, and my mouth has gone dry as the sterile air, my heart as cold: The temperature of true rage is absolute zero and mine is deeper than the ocean, wider than the universe”
― Rick Yancey

“The Earth dark and quiet, the way it was before we showed up to fill it with noise and light. Something ends. Something new begins. This was the in-between time. The pause.”
― Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea

“I thought of the unblemished thing, the thing that lasts, and I thought the only thing with the power to save us also had the power to slay us.”
― Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea

“He promised he would empty me. He would empty me and fill me up with hate. But he broke that promise. He didn't fill me with hate. He filled me with hope”
― Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea

“No hope without faith, no faith without hope, no love without trust, no trust without love. Remove one and the entire human house cards collapses.”
― Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea

“This isn't about ripping the planet away from us, Ben. This is about ripping us.”
― Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea

“You never know when the truth will come home. You can’t choose the time. The time chooses you.”
― Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea

“Give someone the power of the gods and he will become as indifferent as the gods.”
― Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea

“He turned his back to her, inviting the bullet. He was mad, after all, and madness came with its own armor”
― Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea

“I found you, but in finding you, I lost myself.”
― Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea

“Long, nimble fingers clawing at my shirt, the fingers of an artist. Face sculpted by the merciless knife of hunger, the infuriated artist with the helpless clay, and the red eyes rimmed in black.”
― Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea

“And therein lies the conundrum, the riddle you've been avoiding, because confronting the problem shakes apart the very foundation, doesn't it? It defies explanation. It renders all that's happened impossibly discordant, absurd, nonsensical.”
― Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea

“People die. Love endures.”
― Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea

“But there’re the things we tell ourselves about the truth, and there’re the things the truth tells about us.”
― Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea

“Layer by layer, that which separates us falls away, until I reach the center, the nameless region, the defenseless stronghold, an ageless, bottomless ache, the lonely singularity of his soul, unspoiled by time or experience, beyond thought, infinite.”
― Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea

“Some things down to the smallest of things, are worth the sum of all things”
― Rick Yancey, The Last Star

“Some things, down to the smallest of things, are worth the sum of all things.”
― Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea

“I am bound inside the emptiness again. I can't bear it . It will crush me, the absence I lived with for so long that I hardly noticed. Unnoticed until this moment: He showed me how enormous the emptiness was by filling it.”
― Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea

“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, The 5th Wave

“It's always been this way...We bear the unbearable. We endure the unendurable. We do what must be done until we ourselves are undone.”
― Rick Yancey, The Last Star

“There was not breaking through the lie because accepting the truth would break them.”
― Rick Yancey, The Last Star

“Imprisoned for ten millennia inside its limitless mind, now finite. Now free.”
― Rick Yancey, The Last Star

“The ancients had a saying for this, vincit qui patitur, and it applied to the vanquished as well as to the victor. To conquer, you must endure not just your own suffering but the suffering of others. Indifference is the ultimate evolutionary achievement, the highest rung on nature’s ladder.”
― Rick Yancey, The Last Star

“The fundamental flaw in humanity was its humanity. The useless, baffling, self-destructive human tendency to love, to empathize, to sacrifice, to trust, to imagine anything outside the boundaries of its own skin—these things had driven the species to the edge of destruction. Worse, this one organism threatened the survival of all life on Earth.”
― Rick Yancey, The Last Star

“Beyond their immaculate design, the reason sharks rule the ocean is their complete indifference to everything except feeding, procreation, and defending their territory. The shark does not love. It feels no empathy. It trusts nothing. It lives in perfect harmony with its environment because it has no aspirations or desires. And no pity. A shark feels no sorrow, no remorse, hopes for nothing, dreams of nothing, has no illusions about itself or anything beyond itself.”
― Rick Yancey, The Last Star

“No single human being can contain the sum of all that human experience. At the least, it would shatter your personality. How can you hold on to the core of your reality in the midst of so many alternatives?”
― Rick Yancey, The Last Star

“And something else. Something shocking. Not horror. Not sorrow. No confusion or pain or fear. None of the things she must have found in Wonderland.

Instead, her eyes, her face, her entire body has ignited with the opposite of all those things, there all along, unconquerable, undefeatable, immortal. The root of her courage. The foundation of all life, often obscured, never lost.

Joy.”
― Rick Yancey, The Last Star