Hugh Howey Quotes

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

The Loud came before the quiet. That was a Rule of the World, for the bangs and shouts need somewhere to echo, just as bodies need space in which to fall.

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

Statistics were magic like this: they could tell you with near-certainty that a thing would occur, without a hint of when or where.

The stench of his own waste greeted him as he moved between the tall towers. That wasn't how you were supposed to greet someone, he thought.

It's not because we knew” Lukas said, sucking a gasp of air. “It's because we did it.

Juliette felt a wash of fear and relief, those two opposites twisting together like staircase and rail.

He turns to me. There’s a look on his face that makes him appear a decade younger. A look of wonder and discovery. I remember falling in love with that look.

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

But this is where we’re different. You see the future and refuse to change it. Where I come from, we can see the past, but we keep repeating it.

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 indescribable 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.

I can see the scene down in Mission Control right now: a man in a white shirt and black tie checking my vitals on a readout, his chief inquiring if I’ve hit REM sleep yet. “Affirmative, sir. Sleeping like a baby.” “Excellent. Queue up the machine that goes bing!

Her first thought was of food. The ding meant Donny bringing her food.

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.

A soul can’t be pinned and made to heal. It has to be talked into stillness and quietude. It has to want it.