Rick Yancey

“It is exceedingly odd to see a piece of yourself apart from yourself.”

“He stiffened and said with great dignity, "I am a natural scientist. We are accustomed to dealing with shit.”

“Though I understand the theology behind it, the image does not bring me peace; it makes me feel sorry for the lion. It strips him of his essence, the fundamental part of his being. A lion that does not behave as a lion i snot a lion. It isn't even the lion's opposite. It's a mockery of a lion.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“You could see the smile coming a year before it arrived.”

“My heart ached for the snow.”

“She hated him and loved him, longed for him and loathed him, and cursed herself for feeling anything at all”

“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.”

“I always assumed it owed more to the fact that he didn't like me.”

“The world is large, dear Will, and we, no matter how much we would like to pretend otherwise, we are quite small.”

“Snap to, Will Henry!”

“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”

“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.”

“We are the hunters---and we are also the bait.”

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

“Her raised his face to the weeping sky, closed his dark eyes, and sighed deeply, a smile playing on his sensuous lips. "The bloody hour is come.”

“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.”

“Death had brought an end to their misery. Would nothing but a visitation from that same dark angel bring and end to mine?”

“The intervening years are sucked down these acheronian halls like light into a black hole while you helplessly teeter upon the event horizon, where time is measured by the beating of a fly's wing in the stagnant air.”

“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.”

“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.”

“There are times when fear is not our enemy. There are times when fear is our truest, sometimes only, friend.”

“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?”

“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?”

“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!”

“There's a hero in every heart waiting for the dragon to come out.”

“But we fall only that we might rise, Alfred. All of us fall; all of us, as you say, screw up. Falling is not important. It is how we get up after the fall that's important.”

“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.”

“The monstrous act by definition demands a monster.”

“Good God, man, what is that smell?" He eyed with disgust the doctor's filthy cloak."Life," answered the doctor.”

“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.”

“...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"?”

“Alfred," Merryweather said. "OIPEP is the only organization of its kind in the world, with practically unlimited resources and an intelligence network that spans every country in the planet. We shall do what any powerful, multinational bureaucracy would do in such a crisis. We shall hold a meeting!”

“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!”

“Between the sleeping and the waking, it is there. Between the rising and the resting, it is there.It is always there. It gnaws on my heart. It chews on my soul.I turn aside and see it. I stop my ears and hear it. I cover myself and feel it.There are no human words for what I mean.It is the language of the bare bough and the cold stone, pronounced in the fell wind's sullen whisper and the metronomic drip-drip of the rain. It is the song the falling snow sings and the discordant clamour of sunlight ripped apart by the canopy and miserly filtered down.It is what the unseeing eye sees. It is what the deaf ear heres.It is the romantic ballad of death's embrace; the solemn hymn of offal dripping from bloody teeth; the lamentation of the bloated corpse rotting in the sun; the graceful ballet of maggots twisting in the ruins of God's temple.Here in this gray land, we have no name. We are the carcasses reflected in the yellow eye.Our bones are bleached within our skin; our empty sockets regard the crow.Here in this shadow country, our tiny voices scratch like a fly's wing against unmoving air.Ours is the language of imbeciles, the gibberish of idiots. The root and the vine have more to say than us.”