Hugh Howey Quotes

#1. She could tell he was exhausted, maybe half as much as she was, but he was still willing to do anything for her. It made her sad, someone being this loyal to her.

Hugh Howey

#2. I wanted to leave my decision-making behind, along with my responsibility for all future ones.

Hugh Howey

#3. He knew it was too late. The others had heard. Everyone had heard.

Hugh Howey

#4. The lives lost are of less consequence than the spoils gained.

Hugh Howey

#5. Evan Price is not a man to be questioned. He is a man who will question you.

Hugh Howey

#6. And the stains would never wash out. That's what Lukas was saying. She would always have hurt her father. Was that the way to phrase it? Always have had. It was immortal tense. A new rule of grammar.

Hugh Howey

#7. And Lukas would tell them to be good to each other, that there were only so many of them left, and that all the books and all the stars in the universe were pointless with no one to read them, no one to peer through the parting clouds for them. He

Hugh Howey

#8. Once guns were made, who would unmake them? Barrels rested on shoulders and bristled like pincushions above the crowd. There were things, like spoken ideas, that were almost impossible to take back. And he reckoned his people were about to make many more of them.

Hugh Howey

#9. There were piles of tailings and chunks of concrete studded with rebar around the oil rig, which continued to bob its head up and down as if it knew the sad ways of the world, as if depressedly resigned to what was happening, as if saying: 'Of course. Of course.

Hugh Howey

#10. Love was earned and hard-fought and cherished. It was Marco's face and his rough palm on her cheek. It wasn't something a family got for being a family.

Hugh Howey

#11. She imagined herself at age nine, running through these very halls, crying out to her older self across the years.

Hugh Howey

#12. By the time you're reading this warning, you've already acted responsibly.

Hugh Howey

#13. She was desperate for contact, and this stranger was the only person she knew little enough to want it from.

Hugh Howey

#14. I clamp down on those memories. I embrace fresher torments. But my shrink warned me about this, how anger and depression get misassigned, and how if I don't work through shit it'll keep resurfacing in ways I don't expect.

Hugh Howey

#15. It hit her like a loved one turning his back while she was falling, like some great bond that wasn't simply taken away but never truly existed.

Hugh Howey

#16. Toward the voice. The night-shift doctor was heading his way, weaving between the pods, coming for him. Troy clasped his hand over the soreness on his arm. He didn't want to be taken again.

Hugh Howey

#17. A seed of hope caught a taste of moisture. Some wishful kernel buried deep, where he was loathe to acknowledge it lest it poison or choke him, began to sprout.

Hugh Howey

#18. It's because fear sells. It's because war is sport. And it's also very good business.

Hugh Howey

#19. She came alive as one returns from sleep. Alive but different. An empty husk capable of thought, of hearing, of processing. Of wanting men dead.

Hugh Howey

#20. But some scars are memories that have faded, and some memories go with scars that no longer exist.

Hugh Howey

#21. It wasn't that pain grew tolerable or the confusion went away. Instead, it simply became familiar. It became a part of you.

Hugh Howey

#22. Our actions, you know? They last forever. Whatever we do, it'll always be what we did. There's no taking them back.

Hugh Howey

#23. What felt interminable the first time now passes with a quickness borne of familiarity. It makes me wonder if life seems to accelerate as we get older simply because our days and our experiences become routine. The things we recognize flash right by, where once they held our attention.

Hugh Howey

#24. And now you see why some facts, some pieces of knowledge, have to be snuffed out as soon as they form. Curiosity would blow across such embers and burn this silo to the ground.

Hugh Howey

#25. Wasn't the worst, either. In the distance, low rolling hills stood, a pretty shade of brown, like coffee mash with just the right amount of pig's milk in it. The sky above the hills was the same dull gray of his childhood and his father's childhood and his grandfather's childhood. The only

Hugh Howey

#26. The things we recognize flash right by, where once they held our attention. Only the new bears careful contemplation, and the new gets harder and harder to come by.

Hugh Howey

#27. Hello, pineapples,' he whispered. He bent his head toward his lap and punctured the can, listening closely. The pineapples whispered back. They told him they were safe to eat.

Hugh Howey

#28. My only wish is that we leave room for hope. There is good and bad in all things. We find what we expect to find. We see what we expect to see. I have learned that if I tilt my head just right and squint, the world outside is beautiful. The future is bright. There are good things to come.

Hugh Howey

#29. Them up and trying to oil them, sand them, make them into something they could never be again - how

Hugh Howey

#30. Was that the way to phrase it? Always have had. It was immortal tense. A new rule of grammar. Always have had gotten friends killed.

Hugh Howey

#31. I've been married more to his ghost than to him.

Hugh Howey

#32. Another thing I noticed was how quickly the human brain paired causal events. "A" leads to "B." We love to make that link, however tenuous.

Hugh Howey

#33. After a while, you're staying mad just to justify an old mistake. Then it's just a game. Two people staring away, refusing to look back over their shoulders, afraid to be the first one to take that chance.

Hugh Howey

#34. The shadow spoke of a culture forming that overvalued individuality, of children that wanted to get away from their families, of

Hugh Howey

#35. We should use all the tools the gods gave us," Juliette said. "Except for the one you wield, this power to make others fear.

Hugh Howey

#36. Juliette had somehow crossed an uninhabitable void, had gone from one universe to another, was possibly the first ever to have done so, and here was a graveyard of foreign souls, of people just like her having lived and died in a world so similar and so near to her own.

Hugh Howey

#37. Here was where she had learned this skill all those years ago, where she had learned how good it felt to run away.

Hugh Howey

#38. They say bad things come in threes, but I don't think that's true. I think bad things keep right on coming. They don't stop. They'll never stop. It's just too depressing to keep counting, so we start over after the third bad thing.

Hugh Howey

#39. Jahns told Juliette to view this as her first lesson in political compromise. Juliette said she saw it as a display of weakness. Inside,

Hugh Howey

#40. Shelling is like relationships," Ness says. He turns away from me and scans the beach, makes an adjustment with the wheel. "I can see that." He nods to himself. "Yeah, I can totally see that.

Hugh Howey

#41. He became hyperalert at any gathering like this, saw all the tiny details of normal life humming right along. This was when the bombs came and ripped through crowds. At funerals and weddings and religious celebrations.

Hugh Howey

#42. It is September 11, 2013. Twelve years have gone by. I'm on a flight from San Francisco to Ft. Lauderdale, a cross-country flight loaded down with fuel.

Hugh Howey

#43. I remember the rule for semicolons; the sentences on both sides have to be full ones.

Hugh Howey

#44. The various torments of life worked in shifts so that one was always on duty. Thus was human misery extracted day and night like water and oil are pulled from the earth. Thus was the toll inflicted, the price one paid for being unwittingly born.

Hugh Howey

#45. He nearly tripped and fell down the last few steps, his legs not used to an end to the descent, a flat piece of ground rather than one more tread to sink to.

Hugh Howey

#46. Love comes as fast as shrapnel in the trenches. It's indiscriminate. It gets whoever's closest.

Hugh Howey

#47. We are obsessed with sex, because those organisms who have this obsession leave behind many more copies of organisms with this obsession.

Hugh Howey

#48. Sleep looked so much like death, he saw. Every night people perished, if but for a moment.

Hugh Howey

#49. Perhaps, with enough time in these walls, one could become resigned to things never getting better, or even changing all that much. Or maybe a person eventually lost hope that there was anything worth preserving at all.

Hugh Howey

#50. others swapped lewd jokes and fictitious tales of several kinds of booty scored.

Hugh Howey

#51. Test it out, whispering my own name in Claire's ear, but the syllables are lost in a sudden breeze, and the soft sound is carried far out to sea, where it will swirl and mingle and be lost and present for all the rest of time.

Hugh Howey

#52. Better to go out to see the world one time with his own eyes, than to be burned alive with the plastic curtains.

Hugh Howey

#53. Things don't come true. They are true, or they aren't.

Hugh Howey

#54. You think you know what you want, but once you have it, the hole you thought it would fill is that much bigger. The want is what exists, not the thing we lust after.

Hugh Howey

#55. The world around him had gone brown. Brown grass and gray skies. No green. No blue. No life.

Hugh Howey

#56. Heroes didn't win. The heroes were whoever happened to win. History told their story
the dead didn't say a word. All of it was bullshit.

Hugh Howey

#57. I alternated between attempting to make the easy look difficult and the difficult look easy, for this is the dual nature of men in the company of women.

Hugh Howey

#58. This wasn't the end of the end of the world. This was the beginning of something else. An end to the not knowing what was out there.

Hugh Howey

#59. I remind myself that if there was anything in the air that would react with my body, it would've reacted with the scanner. What I really want right now is a second scanner to scan this scanner.

Hugh Howey

#60. I pull her against me, not to make love to her, but just to love her. To hold something good and imperfect and fucked up, and to feel someone holding all of that in return.

Hugh Howey

#61. The point of the silo was for the people to keep the machines running, when Jahns had always, her entire long life, seen it the other way around.

Hugh Howey

#62. Clinging to an idealized past was a poison of sorts, that bastard Nostalgia, making people think there was a better time and place if they could just get back to it.

Hugh Howey

#63. The temperatures rising in the slow-moving air like the heat of angered flesh as capillaries squeezed, the blood in them rising to a boil.

Hugh Howey

#64. There was so much to do and not enough buckets.

Hugh Howey

#65. Donald was verging on the sad realization that humanity had been thrown to the brink of extinction by insane men in positions of power following one another, each thinking the others knew where they were going.

Hugh Howey

#66. In every wreck and crash, there is some unseen man rubbing his hands with thoughts of tidy profits.

Hugh Howey

#67. Stay healthy is not a slippery slope toward unhealthy

Hugh Howey

#68. Part of me knew I'd never see her again, and if I did, that we would both be different.

Hugh Howey

#69. All that remained was the curiosity of it all. The wonder of the outside world beyond the veil of lies.

Hugh Howey

#70. And so it went, sand piling up to the heavens and homes sinking toward hell.

Hugh Howey

#71. they didn't want people talking.
Thinking was fine; they would bury you with your thoughts.
But no collaboration, no groups coordinating together, no change of ideas.

Hugh Howey

#72. He was an easy man to figure, one of those who had grown old everywhere but in his heart, that one organ he had never worn out because he'd never dared to use it.

Hugh Howey

#73. You were just doing your job, she assured him. And then she thought just how powerful that sentiment was, how far down a nasty road that could take a person, shuffling along and simply doing their job.

Hugh Howey

#74. This is not the end, of course. Every story we read, every film we watch, continues in our imagination if we allow it.

Hugh Howey

#75. My approach with social media is to interact with the readers I already have. I do it mostly to procrastinate from my writing. It's an escape. It's the only socializing I get outside of my wife, and she gets sick of me.

Hugh Howey

#76. There was no going back. Apologies weren't welds; they were just an admission that something had been broken. Often between two people.

Hugh Howey

#77. I listen to my voice messages like once a month," I remind Henry. "You should've texted me.

Hugh Howey

#78. Or perhaps it was the nerves of all she wanted to say but couldn't. These topics were as numerous as grains of dust in the outside air, and just as likely to dry her mouth and still her tongue.

Hugh Howey

#79. Sheltering the women and the children played some part; Troy was sure of that. The women and children of Silo One had been gifted with a long sleep while the men stayed and took shifts. It removed the passion from the plans, forestalled the chance that the men might fight among themselves.

Hugh Howey

#80. I guess what I'm sayin' is, if you want to give Jules a job, be very careful."
"Why be careful?" Marnes asked.
Marck gazed up at the confusion of pipes and wires overhead.
"'Cause she'll damn well do it. Even if you don't really expect her to.

Hugh Howey

#81. When there's only God to blame, we forgive him. When it's our fellow man, we destroy him.

Hugh Howey

#82. And the only thing that ends a war like this is trust, release, love for those we hate, arms around those who would kill us, forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness.

Hugh Howey

#83. September 10, 2001. A storm is brewing in New York City. A clash is about to begin. Tempers will soon rise as historical conquests and slights are remembered and renewed on the eve of this fight between ancient and embittered foes. Yes, the Boston Red Sox are playing the New York Yankees.

Hugh Howey

#84. The suit came up, and Holston thought that maybe people went along with it because they couldn't believe it was happening. None of it was real enough to rebel against. The animal part of his mind wasn't made for this, to be calmly ushered to a death it was perfectly aware of.

Hugh Howey

#85. sucked in his breath, and a slice of time hung in the air between them, a pause where hearts did not beat and eyes did not blink.

Hugh Howey

#86. Here, a man could think, surrounded by machines quietly doing the same.

Hugh Howey

#87. Maybe this is the ideal remedy for depression: a gun that can read your mind and is forever pointed at your head. Gives you some good practice in bottling up those dark wishes.

Hugh Howey

#88. And Rocky still sounds angry at me for drilling a hole through his skull. I only did it to keep him close. Woulda lost him otherwise. Do we have to hurt the ones we love to keep them close?

Hugh Howey

#89. if I tilt my head just right and squint, the world outside is beautiful.

Hugh Howey

#90. This was the mark of deep infatuation, he thought: the desire to watch a woman talk just to see her lips move, to be around her.

Hugh Howey

#91. Apologies weren't welds; they were just an admission that something had been broken.

Hugh Howey

#92. Honestly, I don't think I'm a good promoter. I spend almost zero time or effort asking new readers to sample or purchase my work. That's not the job of the author. We should write our best material and leave it up to readers to spread the word.

Hugh Howey

#93. Dust rained in the halls of Mechanical; it shivered free from the violence of the digging.

Hugh Howey

#94. It's easy to forgo distractions and to not accumulate things when you have a larger goal on the horizon.

Hugh Howey

#95. This was how it worked. You lived. You did your best. You got out of the way. You let those who come after you choose. You let them decide for themselves, live their own lives. This was the way.

Hugh Howey

#96. Little fictions. That's what her father called them. Not lies, just stories to twist the brain into a new shape, to allow the light to spill in with a different color, to throw rainbows instead of shadows.

Hugh Howey

#97. The idea of saving anything was folly, a life especially. No life had been truly saved, not in the history of mankind. They were merely prolonged. Everything comes to an end.

Hugh Howey

#98. I'm coming for you. I'm coming home, and I'm coming to clean.

Hugh Howey

#99. There were certain things, learned so young and remembered so deep that they felt like little stones in the center of her mind.

Hugh Howey

#100. They were not battling a trained warrior - this was a politician. Pity stirred, then recoiled from her rising wrath. This was the sort of beast that killed with calculations, concocting war and disease and wiping out millions from the safety of a council meeting. She

Hugh Howey