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 dar… - Hugh Howey

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.

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

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.