Hugh Howey Quotes

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

I used to make fists and hit walls, but it hurt me more than it hurt them. The people who did bad things to me, they didn't care how angry I got. It didn't fix a thing.

He had wandered with innocence and naivete into this web, and now every move would wrap him tighter. Each lie would stick to the others, until one day he would find himself in a tight little cocoon, trapped and suffocating from the thousands of little fibs that living and working in that cursed swamp of a city seemed to require every man to ooze.

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

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

Men wrestle with the things they cannot change, and they ignore those that might bend to some economy of effort.

And how much simpler things would be, how much better for us all, if we had people brave enough to do what was right, instead.

If the lies don't kill you, the truth will.

People from IT sent to replace those they'd killed. Juliette's

We survive in order to struggle. Struggling means we're winning.

At the top of the ramp, Holston saw the heaven into which he'd been condemned for his simple sin of hope.

Tex would introduce himself to every goo-green kid who joined the squad, every piece of farm-fresh. He'd put his arm around their shoulder, tell them his life story, his real name, ask them all about their hometowns, so that even those nearby had to learn shit we'd rather not. We'd get hit by these frag grenades of nicety. He took people in, Tex. Got close to them. Cried like a baby when the smoke cleared and the tags were tallied. And I thought he was fucking crazy, going about war like that. Not learning what the rest of us learned.

he wrote of these things and utter nonsense in the same breath, and this made me dismiss the book. Until I finished it. You have to see all things at once, as on Tralfamadore. I read it again. I caught a glimpse of some other dimension.

The pressure in the airlock grew, and the folds of her suit found every raised scar across her body, wrinkles pressing where wrinkles had once burned. It was a million pricks from a million gentle needles, every sensitive part of her touched all at once, as if this airlock remembered, as if it knew her. A lover's apology.

I know it is fiction to imagine, but what would happen if we stood on the rubble of attacks against us, whether literal or figurative, physical or emotional, personal or political, and we chose to forgive rather than escalate? What does that world look like? Maybe we'll never know. But I like to pretend.

He sounded flustered. Juliette watched him busy about the stove, his movements jerky and manic, and realized she was the one cloistered away and ignorant, not him. He had all these books, decades of reading history, the company of ancestors she could only imagine. What did she have as her experience? A life in a dark hole with thousands of fellow, ignorant savages? She tried to remember this as she watched him dig a finger in his ear and then inspect his fingernail.

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.

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.

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.

A man asks if I'm leaving. People can hear the engines, can see the exhaust, are watching me scramble around the decks to make ready. "C'mon," I tell the man. Others are looking at me expectantly. "Anyone who wants to go, c'mon," I say. I have people to help. Somehow, this helps me.

The talk wasn't necessary. They could just be.

Like I said, I'm not very good at this job.

Sleep was a vehicle for passing the time, for avoiding the present. It was a trolley for the depressed, the impatient, and the dying.

Bottling shit up doesn't fix what's ailing you at the core.

Days passed until they threatened to make a week, and Jimmy could glimpse how weeks might eventually become months. Outside the steel door in the upper room, the men outside were trying to get in. On the radio, they yelled and argued. Jimmy listened sometimes, but all they talked about were the dead and dying and forbidden things, like the great outside.

And the earth sat upon his broken chest.

The thing I hated while reading this book, it turns out, was me. Bad things happen, and shoulders are shrugged. The most serious of events are blended with the strange. The author pulled me inside his mind, and what I found there was a dead stillness, the somber and poignant wisdom of someone with little hope and scars across his eyes.

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

He awoke each morning with familiar shapes at the edges of his vision, could feel memories nearby, but by the time breakfast came, they were already fading. By dinner, they were lost. It left Troy with a sadness, a cold sensation, and a feeling like a hollow stomach
different from hunger
like rainy days as a child when he didn't know how to fill his time. It was the pain of a chronic boredom mixed with the discomfort of time wasted.

He was a good man, but he had a broken heart. That'll take even the best of them down.

We can imagine the two of them having this conversation: Consciousness: "Hey, watcha doing over there?" Subconsciousness: "Trust me, you're better off not knowing." Self-protection

It's the water beyond the titanium sand that draws me in. Not blue, not even the bright green of a clear lagoon, something more like sea foam. A green so bright it has a tint of yellow. The color of clarity. Of shallow water over white sand.

This was how the shift was supposed to go. Waiting and then doing. Sleeping and then waiting. Make it to dinner and then make it to bed. The end was always in sight. There was nothing to rebel against, just a routine.

We labored to understand before we learned how dear knowledge had become, that in the war between nations to dominate so much new territory, ideas had transmuted into a new currency recognizable to all and immediately transferable. Intellectual property rights now serve as an ephemeral gold, weightless and invisible, priceless artifacts one can slip into the folds of his or her brain and smuggle anywhere, undetected.

They must believe they were heading somewhere. Or did they not care? Was it a case of following the tracks laid down yesterday? A boot in a hole, a boot in a hole, round and round. Did these men see themselves as deck hands on some great ark with a noble purpose? Or were they walking in circles simply because they knew the way? Donald remembered running for Congress, thinking he was going to do real good for the future. And then he found himself in an office surrounded by a bewildering tempest of rules, memos and messages, and he quickly learned just to pray for the end of each day. He went from thinking he was going to save the world to passing the time until ... until time ran out.

A fire. An office fire.

Tearing a world down was a simple affair; the gravity of human nature tugged willingly. It was the building up afterward that proved complex. It was what to replace injustice with that very few gave thought to.

If you think affordable DNA sequencers were a scare, or those cloning kits that made the rounds, imagine kids programming nanos in their basements, sharing their designs on the web. It would be worse than when they started printing those plastic guns in those cheap extruder kits. Who knows what they might try and target just for fun? It starts with the neighbor's cat. The next weekend, someone wipes out an entire species by accident.

It means we can't change what's already happened, but we can have an impact on what happens next.

There is much to do, pulling people away, right up until the Coast Guard comes and orders us to stop. Scott is dead. My cell phone is dead. My mother must think me dead. So it goes. I pick up the papers that have drifted down on the boat and have become plastered there, these relics from great buildings that no longer stand. The first one I grab is an insurance document. Listen: What I tell you here is true. The first line on the first page I pick up, it begins: In the event of damage to the building ... So it goes.

Locomotive, Jimmy read. He knew these words. The first part meant 'crazy'. The second part was a person's reason for doing something.

I wonder how many times we've been on this precipice only to delete what we can't understand. And then thinking we can just copy it back, and find that it's been lost. I wonder if this is why downloading the human consciousness has been such a dead end. Like there's some bit of complexity there that can't survive duplication.

The dreaded cry of "reboot," which is to say we have no clue and hopefully the issue will sort itself if we start over, if we clear the cache.

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.

She used to admire people who stood out, but now she could feel herself wary of them.

The ice on the next pane was already disturbed, had been wiped away by someone recently. Beads of condensation stood like tiny lenses warping the light. He rubbed the glass and knew what had happened. He saw the woman inside with the auburn hair that she sometimes kept in a bun. This was not his wife. This was someone who wanted that, wanted him like that. 'Hello?' Troy turned toward the voice.

You laughed either to keep yourself sane or because you'd given up on staying that way. Either way, you laughed.

It doesn't bother me that I won't be around one day," Lukas said after a while. "I don't stress about the fact that I wasn't here a hundred years ago. I think death will be a lot like that. A hundred years from now my life will be just like it was a hundred years ago.

Between the last glimmer of morning stars above, and the size of the leaves beneath me, the mountains provided one last blow to my ego - my sense of belonging to this universe - and made all else seem insignificant by comparison. "It's

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.

The rats represent our imprisonment. We are our own jailors, snared by base impulses, caught in a web of pleasure-seeking. The raft is our way out. Often, we will choose to drift downwind as Thor did, moving where instinct dictates. But we will also have to learn the crucial skill of sailing to windward, like David. This means exerting our willpower and overcoming our base impulses. It means learning to fight our way against our natural currents.

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

Go quietly, and you're a number. Go in spectacular fashion, and you're a name. I

Here was one man who knew of her secret love.

All our hope, the accomplishments of those before us, what the world can be like, that's our Legacy." Bernard's lips broke into a smile. He waved his hand to continue. "And the bad things that can't be stopped, the mistakes that got us here, that's the past.

there is a man blocking our way. Sitting astride a tractor with a big scooping bucket on the front, he yells at us for being on his property. We explain the boats, and he says we can't tie up there, that this is his restaurant. We say there's no room anywhere, that the Coast Guard won't let us leave, that they'll shoot at us if we do. He tells us we better go fucking home and get our guns. He tells us we're at war.

Maybe he wasn't there to lead so much as to provide an illusion to the others that they were being led.

At this point in my boating education, I didn't even know what a "norther" was. Nor did I appreciate what happens when wind blows against the direction of a current. I can tell you now what happens: The wind pushing against the flowing water causes the seas to build and build. They go vertical. They get steep. They form cliffs of ocean blue that boats can fall right off. I'd never heard of nor imagined such a thing. Scott and I were about to see such waves up close.

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.

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.

He could imagine how nice it would be to not understand. To see one's microcosm as the macrocosm. To focus a meter beyond one's own nose.

Juliette trusted the darkness to conceal her smile.

We all have a plan, those of us who love George Romero and Resident Evil. We all keep a sword under our bed, or a chainsaw in our garage. We know the quickest way to the mall, and we practise our stealthy moves when no-one else around is watching. We know where we'll get food, water and gasoline, and where we'll stay until society gets back on its feet. We know the zombies are coming.

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.

In many ways, the cycle of violence in Silo Eighteen was no different than what took place elsewhere. Beyond being more severe, it was the same waxing and waning of the mobs, of each generation revolting against the last, a fifteen-to-twenty-year cycle of bloody upheaval. Victor

He continued to see inevitable events from the past as avoidable, long after they'd taken their course.

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

The fanciful imagination of authors, a class done away with for all the trouble they inspired.

....faking his real life so he can live his fake one.

Youthful vigor becomes more rot than wisdom. Hopeful optimism is battered by harsh reality. Health and understanding seem to intersect in one's forties, the one peaking as the other begins its slow ascent. Maybe you'll know one day what you should've taken the time to appreciate. Maybe it'll be when your knees start popping, when your hands no longer work like they should. It probably won't be any sooner.

The mind rejects the very things worth knowing.

Like Montana Wildhack, Scott dances for a living. But it's called ballet and wardrobe is involved, so somewhow it's more acceptable.

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.

Stay healthy is not a slippery slope toward unhealthy

come with me?' the doctor asked. 'I'd like to stay,' Troy said. He felt a bizarre calmness. All the pain had been ripped away. This was more forceful than forgetting. He remembered everything. His soul had been cut free.

Her life was not yet over, she decided. It just felt this way.

The days pile up and weigh small decisions down, don't they? That decision not to visit. The first few days slide by easy enough; anger and youth power them along. But then they pile up like unrecycled trash.

It turned out that some crooked things looked even worse when straightened. Some tangled knots only made sense once unraveled.

He ran his hands along the faces of the machines, the flashing lights like happy eyes trying to soothe his anger, the electrical hum like whispers to their master, hoping to calm him.

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.

The goal will be to hit IT and contain it. Bernard

I hated Sundays as a kid. From the moment I woke up, I could feel Monday looming, could feel another school week all piled up and ready to smother me. How was I supposed to enjoy a day of freedom while drowning in dread like that? It was impossible. A pit would form in my chest and gut - this indescribably emptiness that I knew should be filled with fun, but instead left me casting about for something to do.
Knowing I should be having fun was a huge part of the problem. knowing that this was a rare day off, a welcome reprieve, and here I was miserable and fighting against it. Maybe this was why Fridays at school were better than Sundays not in school. I was happier doing what I hated, knowing a Saturday was coming, than I was on a perfectly free Sunday with a Monday right around the corner.

You could mix the known, but you couldn't create the strange out of nothing.

You die a little inside every time you have joyless sex. Neurons prune back. The good in there withers. And some things never grow back.

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

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.

We are not the people who made this world, Lukas, but it's up to us to survive it. You need to understand that."
"We can't control where we are right now," he mumbled, "just what we do going forward.

It was amazing to Knox that they all knew, instinctively, how to build implements of pain. It was something even shadows knew how to do at a young age, knowledge somehow dredged up from the brutal depths of their imagination, this ability to deal harm to one another.

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.

There, on that hill, his wife could be seen. She lay like a sleeping boulder, the air and toxins wearing away at her, her arms curled under her head. Maybe.

She was often in danger of forgetting what she was.

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.

to love without sanction,

This was the sort of cruelty that only came from turned backs, from being ignored. Well-aimed lashes and direct blows were more easily understood. At least then the stricken knew their anguished cries were being heard.

My life is too tight, he wanted to say. My skin is too tight. The walls are too tight.

Predict the inevitable", she said, "and you're bound to be right one day.

What if they were all playing the same part? What if each and every one of them was concealing the same doubts, none of them talking because they all felt so completely alone?

Emotions don't know how to stitch back the way flesh could. How do you go to a person, your wife of two decades, and tell her you want to start over again? How do you say, "Forget everything we've got together. Forget the kids and the fights and all the good times, too. I take it all back." How do you do that? It ain't a lizard's tail, those years. It ain't something you walk away from and start over.

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.

There are two competing philosophies in 'Wool': one is that people have to live under an iron thumb in order to survive, and the other one is that everyone should live completely freely and happily and everything will sort itself out.