Hugh Howey Quotes

He could imagine how nice it would be to not understand. To see one's microcosm as the macrocosm. To focus a meter beyond one's own nose.

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

Was this how it began? One silly woman with fire in her blood stirring the hearts of a legion of fools?

Perhaps, with enough time in these walls, one could become resigned to things never getting better, or even changing all that much. Or maybe a person eventually lost hope that there was anything worth preserving at all.

Denial is the secret sauce in this town,” he said. “It’s the flavor that holds all the other ingredients together. 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.

Explain to them that these people are not evil, which we might understand and combat. Explain to them that these people do not care and cannot be made to, which is far worse.

Donald was verging on the sad realization that humanity had been thrown to the brink of extinction by insane men in positions of power following one another, each thinking the others knew where they were going.

He awoke each morning with familiar shapes at the edges of his vision, could feel memories nearby, but by the time breakfast came, they were already fading. By dinner, they were lost. It left Troy with a sadness, a cold sensation, and a feeling like a hollow stomach — different from hunger — like rainy days as a child when he didn't know how to fill his time. It was the pain of a chronic boredom mixed with the discomfort of time wasted.

Liars and dead men – two parties unskilled at dispensing the truth.

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 had wandered with innocence and naivete into this web, and now every move would wrap him tighter. Each lie would stick to the others, until one day he would find himself in a tight little cocoon, trapped and suffocating from the thousands of little fibs that living and working in that cursed swamp of a city seemed to require every man to ooze.

And then there was the routine, the mind-numbing routine. It was the castration of thought, the daily grind of an office worker who drooled at the clock, punched out, watched TV until sleep overtook him, slapped an alarm three times, did it again.

"You need to hear what I have to say," she said. Donald waited. What explanation or apology was there? She had taken from him what little Thurman had left behind. Her father had destroyed the world. Anna had destroyed Donald’s. He waited to hear what she had to say.

In a horror movie, when everyone is hugging their shins and shouting for the main character to turn and run, or crawl under the bed, or call the cops, or grab a gun, NASA would be the dude in the back shouting, “Go see what made that noise! And take a flashlight!

This is not the end, of course. Every story we read, every film we watch, continues in our imagination if we allow it.