The Final Descent Quotes

“It occurred to me. . .that aberrance is a wholly human construct. There were no such things as monsters outside the human mind. We are vain and arrogant, evolution's highest achievement and most dismal failure, prisoners of our self-awareness and the illusion that we stand in the center, that there is us and then there is everything else but us. But we do not stand apart from or above or in the middle of anything. There is nothing apart, nothing above, and the middle is everywhere - and nowhere. We are no more beautiful and essential or magnificent than an earthworm. In fact - and dare we go there, you and I? - you could say the worm is more beautiful, because it is innocent and we are not. The worm has no motive but to survive long enough to make baby worms. There is no betrayal, no cruelty, no envy, no lust, and no hatred in the worm's heart, and so who are the monsters and which species shall we call aberrant?”
― Rick Yancey, The Final Descent

“Human...I don't know what that word means...Tell me what defines it. What sets it apart? Are you going to tell me its love? A crocodile will defend her brood to the death. Hope? A lion will stalk its prey for days. Faith? Who is to say what gods populate an orangutan's imagination. We build? So do termites. We dream? House cats do that on the windowsill...We live in a shabby edifice...hastily erected over a span of ten thousand years, and we draw he flimsy curtains to hide the truth from ourselves.”
― Rick Yancey, The Final Descent

“Cursing is the crutch of an unimaginative mind.”
― Rick Yancey, The Final Descent

“Turn around. I am there, one ten-thousandth of an inch outside your range of vision. I am always there. I am the faceless thing you cannot name, the nameless thing you cannot face.”
― Rick Yancey, The Final Descent

“He is there; I feel him, one ten-thousandth of an inch outside my range of vision. I stalk him. He stalks me. The man who wrote these books is not the man who lives in them. That man is the form; Will Henry is the shadow. And now that shadow lives in me. And it lives in you.”
― Rick Yancey, The Final Descent

“For true beauty—beauty, as it were, with a capital B—is terrifying; it puts us in our place; it reflects back to us our own ugliness. It is the prize beyond price.”
― Rick Yancey, The Final Descent

“If you define madness as the opposite of sane, you are forced into providing a definition of sanity. Can you define it? Can you tell me what it is to be sane? Is it to hold no beliefs that are contrary to reality? That our thoughts and actions contain no absurd contradictions?...If that is your criterion, then we are all mad—except those of us who make no claim to understand the difference. Perhaps there is no difference, except in our own heads. In other words...madness is a wholly human malady borne in a brain too evolved—or not quite evolved enough—to bear the awful burden of its own existence.”
― Rick Yancey, The Final Descent

“Madness is a wholly human malady borne in a brain too evolved—or not quite evolved enough—to bear the awful burden of its own existence.”
― Rick Yancey, The Final Descent

“It is hard...to think about those things we do not think about.”
― Rick Yancey, The Final Descent

“I’ve always thought, if heaven is such a wonderful place, why is entering it so absurdly easy? Confess your sins, ask forgiveness—and that is all? No matter what your crimes?”
― Rick Yancey, The Final Descent

“Time is a line
But we are circles.”
― Rick Yancey, The Final Descent

“For the boy on the bridge. And for all the boys for a hundred generations who drop their lines into the swift dark water to catch the leviathans lurking in the deep: These are the secrets.”
― Rick Yancey, The Final Descent

“aberrance is a wholly human construct. There were no such things as monsters outside the human mind. We are vain and arrogant, evolution’s highest achievement and most dismal failure, prisoners of our self-awareness and the illusion that we stand in the center, that there is us and then there is everything else but us.”
― Rick Yancey, The Final Descent

“Remember me...When all else has been forgotten.”
― Rick Yancey, The Final Descent

“The way is dark, the path is not straight. Easy to get lost, if you don't know the way, easy to go in circles, easy to find yourself at the place from which you began.”
― Rick Yancey, The Final Descent

“Bitterness finds pleasure in the spot from which bitterness springs.”
― Rick Yancey, The Final Descent

“Despair is a wholly selfish response to fortune’s slings and arrows.”
― Rick Yancey, The Final Descent

“There are some we cannot help but take an instant dislike to.”
― Rick Yancey, The Final Descent