Hugh Howey Quotes

When the headlights hit us, the rays acted like a steel blade slicing through our indecision. Our thoughts and plans fell away — as did our logic and ability to reason. All that remained was the urge to flee.

Swiveling in his old wooden chair, the legs squeaking as if startled by the sudden movement, he glanced at the clock on the wall behind him and surveyed the time imprisoned behind its yellowed and crazed plastic dome.

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

NASA garb inside out and scattered like a tux on a wedding night,

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.

The Wrath is what Peter named my mood before eight in the morning. Our marriage might’ve survived if we’d only had to do afternoons.

He thought of men like Hitler, Stalin, and Napoleon. All it took was a lot of seemingly decent people to put the wrong person in power and then fall under their spell.

He turned the coin over and over and contemplated the only thing unusual about him holding a trinket from a world fallen to ashes - and that was him being around to marvel at the loss. It was supposed to be people who died and cultures that lasted. Now, it was the other way around;

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

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

Billy Pilgrim wasn't weak, she decided, as he drifted back to sleep — he was broken. The whole system was broken. Sending young men to war, expecting them to come back whole, their bullets to make things right. Expecting a girl from the Big Sky State to step off a bus in LA and have a career that wouldn't kill her. The machinery of it all was set up unfair from the start. Living in three dimensions meant you learned what you needed to know too late in life.

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.

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.

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?

And then there was the routine, the mind-numbing routine. It was the castration of thought, the daily grind of an office worker who drooled at the clock, punched out, watched TV until sleep overtook him, slapped an alarm three times, did it again.