Rick Yancey - The Monstrumologist

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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
A miscalculation is not negligence, nor prudence a crime. I am a scientist. I base my action or inaction upon probability and evidence. There is a reason we call science a discipline! Inferior minds bolt or build pyres to roast the witches in their midst!

Rick Yancey
She hated him and loved him, longed for him and loathed him, and cursed herself for feeling anything at all

Rick Yancey
There are times when fear is not our enemy. There are times when fear is our truest, sometimes only, friend.

Rick Yancey
And red is not the color of apples or roses or the dresses that pretty girls wear in the summertime. That is not the color of red at all.

Rick Yancey
Self-pity is egotism undiluted, after all—self-centeredness in its purest form.

Rick Yancey
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
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
A man lies upon the floor, spreads his arms, and transforms himself into a ship of a thousand sails.

Rick Yancey
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
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
Soon I will fall asleep and I will wake from this terrible dream. The endless night will fall, and I will rise. I long for that night. I do not fear it. I have had my fill of fear. I have stared too long into the abyss, and now the abyss stares back at me.

Rick Yancey
Afterward I told his widow, "Your husband is dead, but at least he died laughing.' I think she took some comfort in that. It is the second-best way to die, Will Henry." He did not say what the best way was.

Rick Yancey
The doctor frowned upon drinking and often expressed wonderment at men who willingly made imbeciles of themselves.

Rick Yancey
Adolphus is not at his desk. That means he is somewhere in the Monstrumarium, has gone home for the day, or is dead.

Rick Yancey
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
I do not mean to mock or ridicule your life's work, for in one way at least it mimics my own: We have dedicated our lives to the pursuit of phantoms. The difference is the nature of those phantoms. Mine exist between other men's ears; yours live solely between your own.

Rick Yancey
Perhaps God waits for us to be empty, so he may fill us with himself.

Rick Yancey
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
So often the monsters that crowd our minds are nothing more than the strange and thoroughly alien progeny of our own fearful fantasies.

Rick Yancey
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
Oh, Will Henry. After all we have been through, how could I send you away now, at our most critical hour? You are indispensable to me.

Rick Yancey
Yes, my dear child, monsters are real. I happen to have one hanging in my basement.

Rick Yancey
But monsters, I now know, come in all shapes and sizes, and only their appetite for human flesh defines them.

Rick Yancey
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