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.

That means we don’t exist in one place. Instead, everything we do is left in … like a trail out there, a big ring of decisions. Every action we take — ” “And mistake.” He nodded and dabbed at his forehead with his sleeve. “And every mistake. But every good thing we do as well. They are immortal, every single touch we leave behind. Even if nobody sees them or remembers them, that doesn’t matter. That trail will always be what happened, what we did, every choice. The past lives on forever. There’s no changing it.” “Makes you not want to fuck up,” Juliette said, thinking on all the times she had, wondering if this box between them was one more mistake. She saw images of herself in a great loop of space: fighting with her father, losing a lover, going out to clean, a great spiral of hurts like a journey down the stairs with a bleeding foot. 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. Always have had gotten friends killed. Always have had a brother die and a mother take her own life. Always have had taken that damn job as sheriff. There was no going back. Apologies weren’t welds; they were just an admission that something had been broken. Often between two people. “You okay?” Lukas asked. “Ready to go on?” But she knew he was asking more than if her arm was tired. He had this ability to spot her secret worries. He had a keen vision that allowed him to glimpse the smallest pinprick of hurt through heavy clouds. “I’m fine,” she lied. And she searched her past for some noble deed, for a bloodless tread, for any touch on the world that had left it a brighter place. But when she had been sent to clean, she had refused. Always have had refused. She had turned her back and walked off, and there was no chance of going back and doing it any other way.

just know that it takes a bit of courage to unlearn that shame, and to be there for others when they try to unlearn that shame, and that it all gets easier after you feel how healthy it is.

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

It made her sad, thinking about the consequences of their anger, their thirst for revenge. Her husband was gone, ripped from her, and for what? People were dying, and for what? She thought how things could've gone so differently, how they'd had all these dreams, unrealistic perhaps, of a real change in power, an easy fix to impossible and intractable problems. Back then she'd been unfairly treaded, but at least she'd been safe. There had been injustice, but she'd been in love. Did that make it okay? Which sacrifice made more sense?

Gravity is a bitch until she's on your side.

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 so things go unchanged and unaccepted, and our arms and heart grow weary.

Most of us have simple passions at the core of who we are. Those passions might change over time, but at any one moment, I feel like there’s a striving inside us that frames our decisions. The shame is that most people never ask themselves what their passions are, much less look deep into others. They just do whatever feels right at any one moment,

Love comes as fast as shrapnel in the trenches. It’s indiscriminate. It gets whoever’s closest. When it’s your time, it’s your time.

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

After a while, you're staying mad just to justify an old mistake. Then it's just a game. Two people staring away, refusing to look back over their shoulders, afraid to be the first one to take that chance.

Where a story ends is nothing more than a snapshot in time, a brief flash of emotion, a pause. How and if it continues is up to us.

The ice on the next pane was already disturbed, had been wiped away by someone recently. Beads of condensation stood like tiny lenses warping the light. He rubbed the glass and knew what had happened. He saw the woman inside with the auburn hair that she sometimes kept in a bun. This was not his wife. This was someone who wanted that, wanted him like that. ‘Hello?’ Troy turned toward the voice.

Symmetry, by surrounding us, makes itself invisible.