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

Her mother, buried. A town, lost. A small group of men, somewhere out there, cheering.

One of the things she loved about having [him] around was that his thoughts could be so black as to make hers shine gray.

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.