Hugh Howey Quotes

Montana wants to scream, but the thing she is angry at is in the past. The past can’t hear her. This is the thing, her great discovery. She smiles at the future. Happiness is a choice.

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.

But a stronger impulse seized the popular imagination: the ability to be great overnight. It was a new type of lottery, one where fame and talent were won rather than simple money.

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.

There aren’t any rules about how long you gotta know someone to know you love them.

The dust is in the air,” Donald said. He leaned against the counter, his knees weak. The nanos eating away at mankind, they were loosed on the world with every cleaning, little puffs like clockwork, tick-tock with each exile. The headphones sat there quietly. “I am an ancient,” Donald said, using her words. He grabbed the headphones from the desk and repeated into the microphone, loudly, “I am an ancient! I did this!” He sagged once more against the desk, catching himself before he fell. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Louder, yelling it: “I’m sorry!” But nobody was listening.

The first sign that something is wrong is Andrew’s wife running to us, shaking and crying.

Bernard said this last word like it was full of nails and might gut him to spit it out.

Wisely and slowly; they stumble that run fast.

couldn’t fight anymore. You fight because your squad needs you to. When the last man standing beside you goes down, you don’t need a bullet to take out your knees; the depression does that for you. I’ve seen the biggest troopers felled by the heavy darkness. I’ve watched them curl up in the mud and just stop moving. I remember hoping that’d never be me. And here I am.

Imagine this coming down,” I say out loud. I believe it’s the mammal in me that has this thought, the mammal that can remember living in trees.

How could any of them not see where they were going? They’d been going around and around in tiny circles, had been for years, years that sat heavy in the gut of the living. And this was what made stomachs turn: it was the weight of all that time wasted. It was the seconds and minutes and hours, the true nectar of life, gorged on hungrily and thoughtlessly, forever undigestible, everyone hungry for more.

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

Michael had watched his father crawl inside a bottle and die there just so he didn’t have to get up and go to work. It wasn’t long before his mom retreated behind a vacant gaze, leaving him and his sister to pay the bills, to change her stinking bags, to roll her from one sunny patch by the window to another. His mother had become a potted plant they fretted over. No, that wasn’t right. Couldn’t plants at least turn their heads and follow the sun? Weren’t they better than her in that way?

NASA is weird about the things they fear. They get really nervous about unknown life forms, and yet it’s all they talk about. They’re like teenage boys with sex in this way.