Hugh Howey Quotes

When she said his name, it sounded like honey tastes.

They say bad things come in threes, but I don’t think that’s true. I think bad things keep right on coming.

Sorry for her loss. And he had hugged her. Like he knew what she was holding inside, this secret grief that had hardened where her hidden love once lay.

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

And it’s hard to say who moves first. There is a lightning bolt of awareness, an electrical shock as my mind rewires itself to cope with this looming fact: We are about to kiss. And then I’m pulling him into me, and I swear I feel him pulling me as well, and lips that I have damned crash into the lips that damned them. Holding his face, like one might cup a chalice, I realize how thirsty I was for this. How badly I want him right then, in that moment. I don’t care who he is, who I am, or about any story.

The first sign that something is wrong is Andrew’s wife running to us, shaking and crying.

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.

Cave bears hibernated for a season. Humans hibernated each night. Daytime was a shift, each one endured like a quantum of life, all the short-term planning leading up to another bout of darkness, little thought given to stringing those days into something useful, some chain of valuable pearls. Just another day to survive.

Billy Pilgrim wasn't weak, she decided, as he drifted back to sleep — he was broken. The whole system was broken. Sending young men to war, expecting them to come back whole, their bullets to make things right. Expecting a girl from the Big Sky State to step off a bus in LA and have a career that wouldn't kill her. The machinery of it all was set up unfair from the start. Living in three dimensions meant you learned what you needed to know too late in life.

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

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.

Imagine this coming down,” I say out loud. I believe it’s the mammal in me that has this thought, the mammal that can remember living in trees.

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.

I call this the Relativistic Weekend Effect. We live in the present, but our happiness relies heavily on the future.

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.