I can see the scene down in Mission Control right now: a man in a white shirt and black tie checking my vitals on a readout, his chief inquiring if I… - Hugh Howey

couldn’t fight anymore. You fight because your squad needs you to. When the last man standing beside you goes down, you don’t need a bullet to take out your knees; the depression does that for you. I’ve seen the biggest troopers felled by the heavy darkness. I’ve watched them curl up in the mud and just stop moving. I remember hoping that’d never be me. And here I am.

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.

Imagination, she figured, just wasn't up to the task of understanding unique and foreign sensations. It only knew 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 the same as color. You could only describe a new color in terms of hues previously seen. You could mix the known, but you couldn't create the strange out of nothing.