Hugh Howey Quotes

We don't all make it out the other side, not all of us. But somewhere, there's the click of a pen, a proud signature, a father's hand on a young man's shoulder, and we reload. That's the sound of our collective gun cocking, the click of a pen. That's us racking another round in the chamber. Fire that boy out, hope you hit something. If he gets three before he goes home in his own bag, then the numbers look good. That father gets his medal. No one else to wear it.

~ Hugh Howey

Maybe he wasn’t there to lead so much as to provide an illusion to the others that they were being led.

~ Hugh Howey

Where's the everlasting peace? Is there even such a thing? Or do we war like alien races war, eternally, against ourselves?

~ Hugh Howey

Fiction challenges us and works its miracles by placing us in the skin of another human being and teaching us empathy.

~ Hugh Howey

She could tell he was heading toward a bad place. She had seen him go there often enough, knew he had shortcuts he could take to get there in no time.

~ Hugh Howey

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.

~ Hugh Howey

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.

~ Hugh Howey

just know that it takes a bit of courage to unlearn that shame, and to be there for others when they try to unlearn that shame, and that it all gets easier after you feel how healthy it is.

~ Hugh Howey

Sleep was a vehicle for passing the time, for avoiding the present. It was a trolley for the depressed, the impatient, and the dying.

~ Hugh Howey

If the lies don't kill you, the truth will.

~ Hugh Howey

He continued to see inevitable events from the past as avoidable, long after they'd taken their course.

~ Hugh Howey

There were certain things, learned so young and remembered so deep that they felt like little stones in the center of her mind. These would be the parts of her that rotted last, the bits left over once the rest skittered off on the wind or was drunk deep by the roots.

~ Hugh Howey

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.

~ Hugh Howey

To impatient youth, all things took for ever and any kind of waiting was torture. Pg. 221

~ Hugh Howey

I hated Sundays as a kid. From the moment I woke up, I could feel Monday looming, could feel another school week all piled up and ready to smother me. How was I supposed to enjoy a day of freedom while drowning in dread like that? It was impossible. A pit would form in my chest and gut—this indescribable emptiness that I knew should be filled with fun, but instead left me casting about for something to do. Knowing I should be having fun was a huge part of the problem. Knowing that this was a rare day off, a welcome reprieve, and here I was miserable and fighting against it. Maybe this was why Fridays at school were better than Sundays not in school. I was happier doing what I hated, knowing a Saturday was coming, than I was on a perfectly free Sunday with a Monday right around the corner.

~ Hugh Howey

Here was the love and violence in the hearts of men, all for their women

~ Hugh Howey

His impatience for sleep often frightened that very sleep away.

~ Hugh Howey

I guess what I'm sayin' is, if you want to give Jules a job, be very careful.” “Why be careful?” Marnes asked.Marck gazed up at the confusion of pipes and wires overhead.“'Cause she'll damn well do it. Even if you don't really expect her to.

~ Hugh Howey

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.

~ Hugh Howey

Heroes didn't win. The heroes were whoever happened to win. History told their story -- the dead didn't say a word. All of it was bullshit.

~ Hugh Howey

It was a sad loss, this illusion of importance, a humbling blow.

~ Hugh Howey

He’d only ever seen a gun once, a smaller one on the hip of that old deputy, a gun he’d always figured was more for show. He stuffed a fistful of deadly rounds in his pocket, thinking how each one could end an individual life, and understanding why such things were forbidden. Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one’s conscience to get in the way.

~ Hugh Howey

Don't get like these assholes and fall in love with the fighting. Then you're just setting off bombs because you like the noise they make.

~ Hugh Howey

It was the hubris of each generation to think this anew, to think that their time was special, that all things would come to an end with them.

~ Hugh Howey