Hugh Howey Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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;

As Juliette entered the deputy station on one-twenty, she wondered if stopping was a mistake, if she should just press on. But that was her young self afraid of seeing her father, her young self who buried her head in projects in order to avoid the world. She could no longer be that person. She had a responsibility to the silo and its people. Seeing Hank was the right thing to do. She scratched a scar on the back of her hand and bravely strode into his deputy station. She reminded herself that she was the mayor, not a prisoner being sent to clean. Hank glanced up from his desk as she entered. The deputy’s eyes widened as he recognized her – they had not spoken nor seen each other since she got back.

None of us asked to be where we are,” she reminded him coolly.

This gave Lukas pause, thinking of where she was, what she'd been through to get there.

“What we control,” Juliette said, “is our actions once fate puts us there.

Yesterday’s misery had become nostalgic fondness.

In deep space, no one can hear you sob.

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

people were like machines. They broke down. They rattled. They could burn you or maim you if you weren’t careful.

The fact that the universe can come to this, that anyone finds it normal, is comically absurd.