Hugh Howey Quotes

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.

If he checks the colreg logs, he’ll see that I’m not exactly lying. I am under quarantine. What the logs won’t say is that it was a computer virus, and that the victim was my beacon. Strange the lengths I’ll go to in order to keep people away from me, considering how lonely I feel most of the time. I guess that’s the strange torment I suffer: dying for company, for someone to talk to, but it’s never the right someone who shows. And an unwelcome presence is far worse than miserable silence.

The tweezers weren’t where they were supposed to be. He dug in the bottom of the kit until he found them, cursed the men on other shifts with no respect for their colleagues. It was like living in a dorm, Darcy thought. No, not the right word, the right memory. Like living in a barracks. It was the semblance of order over an underlying mess. Crisp sheets with folded corners over stained mattresses. That’s what this was, people not putting things back where they belonged.

There were piles of tailings and chunks of concrete studded with rebar around the oil rig, which continued to bob its head up and down as if it knew the sad ways of the world, as if depressedly resigned to what was happening, as if saying: 'Of course. Of course.

I glance at my wristwatch. It has gotten so late that it is now September 11, and there I am standing in a patch of blue and empty sky.

There were things that could not be contemplated, he realized. There were potential truths too costly to bear. It wasn’t until after the body was scarred by a brush with danger that it learned fear. Conner thought of all the untouched places on his soul yet to teach him something. All the unblemished parts of him waiting for that razor of truth.

These five links stand out in the chain that binds our will. They hold us, guide us, coerce us — And we rattle them still. ~The Bern Seer~

And Rocky still sounds angry at me for drilling a hole through his skull. I only did it to keep him close. Woulda lost him otherwise. Do we have to hurt the ones we love to keep them close?

That’s the problem with the truth,” Darcy said. “Liars and honest men both claim to have it.

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.

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

You were just doing your job,” she assured him. And then she thought just how powerful that sentiment was, how far down a nasty road that could take a person, shuffling along and simply doing their job.

And an unwelcome presence is far worse than miserable silence.

Days passed until they threatened to make a week, and Jimmy could glimpse how weeks might eventually become months. Outside the steel door in the upper room, the men outside were trying to get in. On the radio, they yelled and argued. Jimmy listened sometimes, but all they talked about were the dead and dying and forbidden things, like the great outside.

Imagination, she figured, just wasn't up to the task of understanding unique and foreign sensations. It only knew how to dampen or augment what it already knew. It would be like telling someone what sex felt like, or an orgasm. Impossible. But once you felt it yourself, you could then imagine varying degrees of this new sensation.

It was the same as color. You could only describe a new color in terms of hues previously seen. You could mix the known, but you couldn't create the strange out of nothing.