“There are times when fear is not our enemy. There are times when fear is our truest, sometimes only, friend.”
― Rick Yancey, quote from The Monstrumologist
“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.”
― Rick Yancey, quote from The Monstrumologist
“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?”
― Rick Yancey, quote from The Monstrumologist
“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, quote from The Monstrumologist
“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, quote from The Monstrumologist
“Yes, my dear child, monsters are real. I happen to have one hanging in my basement.”
― Rick Yancey, quote from The Monstrumologist
“Self-pity is egotism undiluted, after all—self-centeredness in its purest form.”
― Rick Yancey, quote from The Monstrumologist
“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, quote from The Monstrumologist
“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, quote from The Monstrumologist
“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, quote from The Monstrumologist
“That's a stupid question,' said Malachi. 'Because he didn't warn him. He didn't warn anyone.'
'No, it's a philosophical question,' Kearns corrected him. 'Which makes it useless, not stupid.”
― Rick Yancey, quote from The Monstrumologist
“We are slaves, all of us...Some are slaves to fear. Others are slaves to reason—or base desire. It is our lot to be slaves...and the question must be to what shall we owe our indenture? Will it be to truth or to falsehood, hope or despair, light or darkness? I choose to serve the light, even though that bondage often lies in darkness.”
― Rick Yancey, quote from The Monstrumologist
“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.”
― Rick Yancey, quote from The Monstrumologist
“We are the hunters---and we are also the bait.”
― Rick Yancey, quote from The Monstrumologist
“...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"?”
― Rick Yancey, quote from The Monstrumologist
“Perhaps that is our doom, our human curse, to never really know one another.”
― Rick Yancey, quote from 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.”
― Rick Yancey, quote from The Monstrumologist
“But monsters, I now know, come in all shapes and sizes, and only their appetite for human flesh defines them.”
― Rick Yancey, quote from The Monstrumologist
“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, quote from The Monstrumologist
“The only truth is the truth of the now. There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. There is no morality, but the morality of the moment.”
― Rick Yancey, quote from The Monstrumologist
“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, quote from The Monstrumologist
“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, quote from The Monstrumologist
“Do you know why our race is doomed, Pellinore? Because it has fallen in love with the pleasant fiction that we are somehow above the very rules that we have determined govern everything else.”
― Rick Yancey, quote from The Monstrumologist
“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, quote from The Monstrumologist
“The doctor frowned upon drinking and often expressed wonderment at men who willingly made imbeciles of themselves.”
― Rick Yancey, quote from The Monstrumologist
“Our fathers had bequeathed us nothing but memories. A fire had stripped me of all tangible tokens, save my little hat; Alistair Warthrop had taken most of what had belonged to Pellinore. What remained of them was simply us, and when we departed, so would they. We were the tablets upon which their lives were writ.”
― Rick Yancey, quote from The Monstrumologist
“Back into your box, anonymous Yorick, with your sutured eyes and frozen scream! The indignity of your internment is no worse than ours.”
― Rick Yancey, quote from The Monstrumologist
“We often take vengeance long after the fact upon blameless surrogates, reprising the same sins of the ones who trespassed against us, and so perpetuate ad infinitum the pain we suffered at their hands.”
― Rick Yancey, quote from The Monstrumologist
“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.”
― Rick Yancey, quote from The Monstrumologist
Rick Yancey
Born place: The United States
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“She stepped away and considered the couch. “First we have to get this house in order. Would you please move the couch again?” I stared at the couch. I had moved it maybe eight hundred times in the last two days. “Which wall?” She chewed at her thumb, thinking. “Over there.” “That’s where it was two moves ago.” It was a big couch. It probably weighed three thousand pounds. “Yes, but that was when the entertainment center was by the fireplace. Now that we’ve put the entertainment center by the entry, the look will be completely different.” “We?” “Yes. We.” I bent into the couch and dragged it to the opposite wall. Four thousand pounds. I was squaring the couch when the phone rang. Lucy spoke for a minute, then held out the phone. “Joe.” Joe Pike and I are partners in the detective agency that bears my name. He could have his name on it if he wanted, but he doesn’t. He’s like that. I took the phone. “Hernias R Us.” Lucy rolled her eyes and turned away, already contemplating new sofa arrangements.”
― Robert Crais, quote from L.A. Requiem
“and burdens of mature life, when they became aware of their own weakness, they lost their peace, they let go of their precious self-respect, and it became impossible for them to “believe.” That is to say it became impossible for them to comfort themselves, to reassure themselves, with the images and concepts that they found reassuring in childhood. Place no hope in the feeling of assurance, in spiritual comfort. You may well have to get along without this. Place no hope in the inspirational preachers of Christian sunshine, who are able to pick you up and set you back on your feet and make you feel good for three or four days—until you fold up and collapse into despair. Self-confidence is a precious natural gift, a sign of health. But it is not the same thing as faith. Faith is much deeper, and it must be deep enough to subsist when we are weak, when we are sick, when our self-confidence is gone, when our self-respect is gone. I do not mean that faith only functions when we are otherwise in a state of collapse. But true faith must be able to go on even when everything else is taken away from us. Only a humble man is able to accept faith on these terms, so completely without reservation that he is glad of it in its pure state, and welcomes it happily even when nothing else comes with it, and when everything else is taken away.”
― Thomas Merton, quote from New Seeds of Contemplation
“التدمير الإنتحاري الذي تسبب فيه النظام الاوروبي للدولة خلال حربين عالميتين هدم فكرة تفوق العقلانية الغربية، في حين أضحى من الصعب التمييز بين المتمدن و الهمجي –و هو تمييز كان غريزيا لدى الاوروبيين في القرن التاسع عشر”
― Francis Fukuyama, quote from The End of History and the Last Man
“Why do I need TV when I have forty-eight apartment windows to watch across the vacant lot, and a sliver of Lake Erie? I've seen history out this window. So much. I was four when we moved here in 1919. The fruit-sellers' carts and coal wagons were pulled down the street by horses back then. I used to stand just here and watch the coal brought up by the handsome lad from Groza, the village my parents were born in. Gibb Street was mainly Rumanians back then. It was "Adio" - "Good-bye"- in all the shops when you left. Then the Rumanians started leaving. They weren't the first, or the last. This has always been a working-class neighborhood. It's like a cheap hotel - you stay until you've got enough money to leave.”
― Paul Fleischman, quote from Seedfolks
“The old woman’s face was wreathed in smiles.”
― Shi Nai'an, quote from Outlaws of the Marsh
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