Hugh Howey Quotes

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 was the mark of deep infatuation, he thought: the desire to watch a woman talk just to see her lips move, to be around her.

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.

His impatience for sleep often frightened that very sleep away.

I know it is fiction to imagine, but what would happen if we stood on the rubble of attacks against us, whether literal or figurative, physical or emotional, personal or political, and we chose to forgive rather than escalate? What does that world look like? Maybe we’ll never know. But I like to pretend.

All it took was for a lot of seemingly decent people to put the wrong person in power, and then pay for their innocent choice.

Our tears are trying to serve a purpose, but we rarely let them. I don't know how we got started with subverting that purpose.

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.

Imagination, she figured, just wasn’t up to the task of understanding unique and foreign sensations. It knew only 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 easy to blame people for the misery of life rather than blaming the sand. Yelling at the sand got you nowhere. People yelled back, and at least that was a response. An acknowledgment. Being tormented and simultaneously ignored was the worst.

some things are better off back in the past. Where they belong.

Here’s what I tell the newly elected: the truth is gonna get out — it always does — but it’s gonna blend in with all the lies.” The Senator twirled a hand in the air. “You have to deny each lie and every truth with the same vinegar. Let those websites and blowhards who bitch about cover-ups confuse the public for you.

funny how easily we forget the good times while the nightmares haunt us. Guess that’s a survival mechanism. We’re not here to be happy; we’re just here to be here.

You die a little inside every time you have joyless sex. Neurons prune back. The good in there withers. And some things never grow back.

Imagine the first discovery that one of these epidemics was man-made — the panic, the violence that would ensue. That’s where the end would come. A typhoon kills a few hundred people, does a few billion in damage, and what do we do?” Erskine interlocked his fingers. “We come together. We put the pieces back. But a terrorist’s bomb.” He frowned. “A terrorist’s bomb does the same damage, and it throws the world into turmoil.”
He spread his hands apart like an explosion going off.
“When there’s only God to blame, we forgive him. When it’s our fellow man, we must destroy him.