Hugh Howey Quotes

Maybe the kinds of people who try to shape the world feel like they’re smarter than chaos itself.

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

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

The things we recognize flash right by, where once they held our attention. Only the new bears careful contemplation, and the new gets harder and harder to come by.

I clamp down on those memories. I embrace fresher torments. But my shrink warned me about this, how anger and depression get misassigned, and how if I don’t work through shit it’ll keep resurfacing in ways I don’t expect.

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.

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.

We tend to discover only those things we seek.

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

How many laws could she break now that she was in a position to uphold them all?

No life had ever been truly saved, not in the history of mankind. They were merely prolonged. Everything comes to an end.

His response was that it was a burden doing what he knew to be correct, to be sound and logical.’ Erskine ran one hand across the pod as if he could touch his daughter within. ‘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.

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

I also remember catching the eye of the few conscientious objectors in the terminal, the people opposed to the war but afraid to speak up. There was no hate in their eyes, only pity. Sadness. Knowledge that I might be necessary, but that we shouldn’t be proud that I was necessary. That’s how I saw myself and my company by the end of my second tour. I didn’t hate what we did so much as hate the need for it all. No one should applaud this. We should bow our heads not in thanks but in sadness.

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.