Rick Yancey - The 5th Wave

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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
After another half second, he's locked me in a bear hug, crushing me into his chest and lifting my feet a couple inches off the ground as I kick furiously with my heels, twisting my head back and forth, snapping at his forearm with my teeth. And the whole time his lips tickling the delicate skin of my ear. "Cassie. Don't. Cassie..." "Let...me...go." "That's been the whole problem. I can't.

Rick Yancey
I would kill for a cheeseburger. Honestly. If I stumbled across someone eating a cheeseburger, I would kill them for it.

Rick Yancey
Still, you tend to believe what you always believed, think what you always thought, expect what you always expected

Rick Yancey
I will teach you to love death. I will empty you of grief and guilt and self-pity and fill you up with hate and cunning and the spirit of vengeance. I will make my final stand here, Benjamin Thomas Parish.

Rick Yancey
I am a shark, Cassie," he says slowly, drawing the words out, as if he might be speaking to me for the last time. Looking into my eyes with tears in his, as if he's seeing me for the last time. "A shark who dreamed he was a man.

Rick Yancey
I don't care what the stars say about how small we are. One, even the smallest, weakest, most insignificant one, matters.

Rick Yancey
A moment comes in war when the last line must be crossed. The line that separates what you hold dear from what total war demands. If he couldn't cross that line, the battle was over, and he was lost. His heart, the war. Her face, the battlefield. With a cry only he could hear, the hunter turned. And ran.

Rick Yancey
Even the most sensitive person can get used to even the most insensitive thing. Cruelty isn't a personality trait. Cruelty is a habit.

Rick Yancey
I'm here because they've killed almost all of us, but not all of us. And that's their mistake, son. That's the flaw in their plan. Because if you don't kill all of us at once, whoever's left are not going to be the weak ones. The strong ones- and only the strong ones- will survive. The bent but unbroken, if you know what I mean. People like me. And people like you.

Rick Yancey
And in more than half the pictures, she isn't looking at the camera; she's looking at him. Not the way I would look at Ben Parish, all squishy around the eyes. She looks at Evan fiercely, like, This here? It's mine

Rick Yancey
Maybe the last human being on Earth won't die of starvation or exposure or as a meal of wild animals. Maybe the last one to die will be killed by the last one alive.

Rick Yancey
When the moment comes to stop running from your past, to turn around and face the thing you thought you could not face—the moment when your life teeters between giving up and getting up—when that moment comes, and it always comes, if you can't get up and you can't give up either, here's what you do: Crawl.

Rick Yancey
When I wake up the next morning, there's a Hershey's Kiss sitting on the table beside me.

Rick Yancey
It was the price of survival. The cost of his people's last, desperate gamble: To rid his new home of humanity, he had to become human. And being human, he had to overcome his humanity.

Rick Yancey
Prayers and promises. The one his sister made to him. The unspoken one I made to my sister. Prayers are promises, too, and these are the days of broken promises.

Rick Yancey
I thought I knew what loneliness was before he found me, but I had no clue. You don't know what real loneliness is until you've known the opposite.

Rick Yancey
There's the bullshit you know that you know; the bullshit you don't know and know you don't know; and the bullshit you just think you know but really don't.

Rick Yancey
It's like a cockroach working up a plan to defeat the shoe on its way down to crush it.

Rick Yancey
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
I don't move. I wait behind my log, terrified. Over the past ten minutes, it's become such a dear friend, I consider naming it: Howard, my pet log.

Rick Yancey
The minute we decide that one person doesn't matter anymore, they've won.

Rick Yancey
Why did they come billions of miles just to stare at us? It's rude.

Rick Yancey
I'm not encouraged by the silence. I can think of no benign reason for it. I'm afraid we may expect something closer to Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas than a scene from Close Encounters, and we all know how that turned out for the Native Americans.

Rick Yancey
You can only call someone crazy if there's someone else who's normal. Like good and evil. If everything was good, then nothing would be good.

Rick Yancey
You know how sometimes you tell yourself that you have a choice, but really you don't have a choice? Just because there are alternatives doesn't mean they apply to you.

Rick Yancey
The beautiful wooden board on a stand in my father's study. The gleaming ivory pieces. The stern king. The haughty queen. The noble knight. The pious bishop. And the game itself, the way each piece contributed its individual power to the whole. It was simple. It was complex. It was savage; it was elegant. It was a dance; it was a war. It was finite and eternal. It was life.

Rick Yancey
It isn't that the lies are too beautiful to resist. It's that the truth is too hideous to face.

Rick Yancey
When you look death in the eye and death blinks first, nothing seems impossible.

Rick Yancey
There was, like, this black hole where the world used to be, and we were both falling toward it. What could we hold on to?

Rick Yancey