Top 200 Hugh Howey Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “My only wish is that we leave room for hope. There is good and bad in all things. We find what we expect to find. We see what we expect to see. I have learned that if I tilt my head just right and squint, the world outside is beautiful. The future is bright. There are good things to come.”

— Hugh Howey

2. “My life is too tight, he wanted to say. My skin is too tight. The walls are too tight.”

— Hugh Howey

3. “I’m coming for you. I’m coming home, I’m coming to clean.”

— Hugh Howey

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

— Hugh Howey

5. “Sometimes a thing needed opening before closure was found.”

— Hugh Howey

6. “When I needed an e-book formatted fast and formatted perfectly, Polgarus Studio came through for me. My expectations were exceeded. It’s a relief knowing I can count on a hand-formatted e-book that will work on every device. Highly recommended!”

— Hugh Howey

7. “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.”

— Hugh Howey

8. “It’s because fear sells. It’s because war is sport. And it’s also very good business.”

— Hugh Howey

9. “They say bad things come in threes, but I don’t think that’s true. I think bad things keep right on coming. They don’t stop. They’ll never stop. It’s just too depressing to keep counting, so we start over after the third bad thing.”

— Hugh Howey

10. “Even in the darkness, his smile threw shadows.”

— Hugh Howey

11. “Hush my Darling, don’t you cry I’m going to sing you a lullaby Though I’m far away it seems I’ll be with you in your dreams. Hush my Darling, go to sleep All around you angels keep In the morn and through the day They will keep your fears at bay. Sleep my Darling, don’t you cry I’m going to sing you a lullaby.”

— Hugh Howey

12. “I know it is fiction to imagine, but what would happen if we stood on the rubble of attacks against us, whether literal or figurative, physical or emotional, personal or political, and we chose to forgive rather than escalate? What does that world look like? Maybe we’ll never know. But I like to pretend.”

— Hugh Howey

13. “The best kisses in the world take place at night, in the ocean, with two naked bodies coiled around one another, only the stars to keep them company.”

— Hugh Howey

Featured in: Romance Quotes

14. “I was beautiful, once, you know.’ Mrs. Crowe withdrew her hands and folded them in her lap. ‘Once that’s gone, once it leaves us for good, no one will ever see it again.”

— Hugh Howey

15. “Statistics were magic like this: they could tell you with near-certainty that a thing would occur, without a hint of when or where.”

— Hugh Howey

16. “It turned out that some crooked things looked even worse when straightened. Some tangled knots only made sense once unraveled.”

— Hugh Howey

17. “The Sherpa of Changli had a saying: A man can count on two hands all the climbs he conquers, and that man conquers nothing. I always took this to mean the more we summit the more we lose.”

— Hugh Howey

18. “I use social media not to ask new people to like my stuff. I use social media to connect with that one reader who likes my stuff.”

— Hugh Howey

19. “He thought of men like Hitler, Stalin, and Napoleon. All it took was a lot of seemingly decent people to put the wrong person in power and then fall under their spell.”

— Hugh Howey

20. “There is good and bad in all things. We find what we expect to find. We see what we expect to see. I have learned that if I tilt my head just right and squint, the world outside is beautiful.”

— Hugh Howey

21. “Sometimes the real looks fake, especially when you’ve looked at the fake for so long.”

— Hugh Howey

22. “And an unwelcome presence is far worse than miserable silence.”

— Hugh Howey

23. “When there’s only God to blame, we forgive him. When it’s our fellow man, we destroy him.”

— Hugh Howey

24. “No good coming from the truth? Knowing the truth is always good. And better that it’s us discovering it than someone else, right?”

— Hugh Howey

25. “We are born, we are shadows, we cast shadows of own, and then we are gone. All anyone can hope for is to be remembered two shadows deep.”

— Hugh Howey

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

— Hugh Howey

27. “All that remained was the curiosity of it all. The wonder of the outside world beyond the veil of lies.”

— Hugh Howey

28. “I call this the Relativistic Weekend Effect. We live in the present, but our happiness relies heavily on the future. Our mood is as much expectation as experience.”

— Hugh Howey

29. “Bones buried with bones, keeping the secrets held between them safe.”

— Hugh Howey

30. “One departs and leaves behind the gift of sustenance, of life. They make room for the next generation. We are born, we are shadows, we cast shadows of our own, and then we are gone. All anyone can hope for is to be remembered two shadows deep.”

— Hugh Howey

31. “Maybe prisoners in isolation feel what I feel: they hate their guards, but a beating now and then is at least some human contact.”

— Hugh Howey

32. “That silence seems to build and build, like the darkness I saw once in a cave in West Virginia. Darkness you can chew. Darkness you can feel for miles all around you. Darkness you’re not sure you’ll ever crawl out of.”

— Hugh Howey

33. “It’s easy to forgo distractions and to not accumulate things when you have a larger goal on the horizon.”

— Hugh Howey

34. “The tweezers weren’t where they were supposed to be. He dug in the bottom of the kit until he found them, cursed the men on other shifts with no respect for their colleagues. It was like living in a dorm, Darcy thought. No, not the right word, the right memory. Like living in a barracks. It was the semblance of order over an underlying mess. Crisp sheets with folded corners over stained mattresses. That’s what this was, people not putting things back where they belonged.”

— Hugh Howey

35. “Was that the way to phrase it? Always have had. It was immortal tense. A new rule of grammar. Always have had gotten friends killed.”

— Hugh Howey

36. “And every mistake. But every good thing we do as well. They are immortal, every single touch we leave behind. Even if nobody sees them or remembers them, that doesn’t matter. That trail will always be what happened, what we did, every choice. The past lives on forever. There’s no changing it.”

— Hugh Howey

37. “A seed of hope caught a taste of moisture. Some wishful kernel buried deep, where he was loathe to acknowledge it lest it poison or choke him, began to sprout.”

— Hugh Howey

38. “There are two competing philosophies in Wool: one is that people have to live under an iron thumb in order to survive, and the other one is that everyone should live completely freely and happily and everything will sort itself out.”

— Hugh Howey

39. “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

40. “The cockpit filled with a soft, blue glow as bioluminescent creatures came out of hibernation and began to feed.”

— Hugh Howey

41. “It’s always okay to admit when you don’t know something. If you couldn’t do this, you would never truly know anything.”

— Hugh Howey

42. “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.”

— Hugh Howey

43. “Crying isn’t simply about opening the floodgates to some private trauma and letting it out – crying is just as much about letting those around you know you’re hurting.”

— Hugh Howey

44. “There was no planning for insanity. With enough revolutions and elections, enough transfers of power, eventually a madman would take the reins.”

— Hugh Howey

45. “We tend to discover only those things we seek.”

— Hugh Howey

46. “The Loud came before the quiet. That was a Rule of the World, for the bangs and shouts need somewhere to echo, just as bodies need space in which to fall.”

— Hugh Howey

47. “I’m sorry.” Two words that I used to choke on when I was younger, that I only now know the value of, the true worth, and how good they feel to say.”

— Hugh Howey

48. “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.”

— Hugh Howey

49. “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.”

— Hugh Howey

50. “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.”

— Hugh Howey