Top 200 Hugh Howey Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “A Poem of Madness Five links stand out in the chain that binds our will. There’s the primal urges, wound tight in nucleotidal strands. There’s the faith that surges through our clasped and superstitious hands. There’s the politics of kings and queens, and their many rules. There’s culture which forms mobs of motley fools. Last comes our decisions, stacked up in piles of regret that we long to forget.”

— Hugh Howey

52. “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

53. “But I can’t say the words. This is how relationships are most like the things I collect: We build these hard exteriors. We pull ourselves inside, block off the only way in, don’t let anyone see our true selves.”

— Hugh Howey

54. “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

55. “I am about to die. It is September 11, and every cell in my body is acutely aware of my looming demise. The certainty of it. The inevitability. Not years from now, not weeks nor days. Moments.”

— Hugh Howey

56. “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

57. “There, on that hill, his wife could be seen. She lay like a sleeping boulder, the air and toxins wearing away at her, her arms curled under her head. Maybe.”

— Hugh Howey

58. “She is on the planet Tralfamadore, billions of light years from Earth, but she feels right at home in this stranger’s arms. The way a mosquito feels at peace in amber.”

— Hugh Howey

59. “When the headlights hit us, the rays acted like a steel blade slicing through our indecision. Our thoughts and plans fell away – as did our logic and ability to reason. All that remained was the urge to flee.”

— Hugh Howey

60. “At this point in my boating education, I didn’t even know what a “norther” was. Nor did I appreciate what happens when wind blows against the direction of a current. I can tell you now what happens: The wind pushing against the flowing water causes the seas to build and build. They go vertical. They get steep. They form cliffs of ocean blue that boats can fall right off. I’d never heard of nor imagined such a thing. Scott and I were about to see such waves up close.”

— Hugh Howey

61. “Youthful vigor becomes more rot than wisdom. Hopeful optimism is battered by harsh reality. Health and understanding seem to intersect in one’s forties, the one peaking as the other begins its slow ascent. Maybe you’ll know one day what you should’ve taken the time to appreciate. Maybe it’ll be when your knees start popping, when your hands no longer work like they should. It probably won’t be any sooner.”

— Hugh Howey

62. “Liars and dead men – two parties unskilled at dispensing the truth.”

— Hugh Howey

63. “The fact that the universe can come to this, that anyone finds it normal, is comically absurd.”

— Hugh Howey

64. “Ever since I was twelve, I dreamed of being an author. I just never had the fortitude to see any of my stories through to completion. I would start a book, get a few chapters in, and grow bored or get distracted by something else.”

— Hugh Howey

65. “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

66. “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 dared to use it.”

— Hugh Howey

67. “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

68. “That always amazed him: how centuries of bare palms and shuffling feet could wear down solid steel.”

— Hugh Howey

69. “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

70. “Heroes have warts; villains have soft spots. Main characters don’t always learn their lessons because all too often we don’t, either. There isn’t always a happy ending, but sometimes there is.”

— Hugh Howey

71. “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

72. “You laughed either to keep yourself sane or because you’d given up on staying that way. Either way, you laughed.”

— Hugh Howey

73. “The silo was something she had always taken for granted. The priests say it had always been here, that it was lovingly created by a caring God, that everything they would ever need had been provided for. Juliette had a hard time with this story.”

— Hugh Howey

74. “And not just the wilds of sand and dune but the wilds of life, those years in a man’s twenties when he shrugs off the shelter of youth and before he has bothered to erect his own. The tent-less years. The bright and blinding years in which men wander as the planets do.”

— Hugh Howey

75. “The stories we tell ourselves to explain our actions are rarely the true reasons behind those actions. The deeper we look into this, the more we realize how much of it is going on. I said in the last part of this series that we are not rational animals – we are rationalizing animals. We act first, and then we come up with a story for why we acted.”

— Hugh Howey

76. “Swiveling in his old wooden chair, the legs squeaking as if startled by the sudden movement, he glanced at the clock on the wall behind him and surveyed the time imprisoned behind its yellowed and crazed plastic dome.”

— Hugh Howey

77. “Time slipped away in a familiar manner, and love dwindled as it was tossed back and forth in the form of arguments. It could only go away, everything she saw and everywhere she looked. Money. It disappeared from her accounts no matter how hard she tried to save. Time and love and wealth and anything worth building or wrapping one’s arms around, trying to hold on to it all, eroding like the cascade of sand between two palms, stolen by the breeze.”

— Hugh Howey

78. “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’ve hit REM sleep yet. “Affirmative, sir. Sleeping like a baby.” “Excellent. Queue up the machine that goes bing!”

— Hugh Howey

79. “The rats represent our imprisonment. We are our own jailors, snared by base impulses, caught in a web of pleasure-seeking. The raft is our way out. Often, we will choose to drift downwind as Thor did, moving where instinct dictates. But we will also have to learn the crucial skill of sailing to windward, like David. This means exerting our willpower and overcoming our base impulses. It means learning to fight our way against our natural currents.”

— Hugh Howey

80. “We should use all the tools the gods gave us,” Juliette said. “Except for the one you wield, this power to make others fear.”

— Hugh Howey

81. “It’s the water beyond the titanium sand that draws me in. Not blue, not even the bright green of a clear lagoon, something more like sea foam. A green so bright it has a tint of yellow. The color of clarity. Of shallow water over white sand.”

— Hugh Howey

82. “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

83. “Love was earned and hard-fought and cherished. It was Marco’s face and his rough palm on her cheek. It wasn’t something a family got for being a family.”

— Hugh Howey

84. “When she said his name, it sounded like honey tastes.”

— Hugh Howey

85. “Thank you,” she said, remembering her manners. And then, after some consideration: “I’m sorry I fell asleep.”

— Hugh Howey

86. “This is the thing about being a hero: It’s all about when you get your picture taken.”

— Hugh Howey

87. “Daytime was a shift, each one endured like a quantum of life, all the short-term planning leading up to another bout of darkness, little thought given to stringing those days into something useful, some chain of valuable pearls. Just another day to survive.”

— Hugh Howey

88. “The chewy meat center of their big ol’ spacesicle.”

— Hugh Howey

89. “Abusive relationships often go like this: falling in love, not seeing the ugly side, coming up with rationalizations when you do. It’s hard to get free, because you just want to recapture some lost feeling. You want to feel safe, respected, honored again. And you’ll play games with your mind to make that happen. It’s the alcohol’s fault; it’s the stress of their job; you may even make the great sin of blaming yourself.”

— Hugh Howey

90. “This was what happened to the dying soul; it scrambled for some perch, some stairway to cling to, some way not to fall.”

— Hugh Howey

91. “Apologies weren’t welds; they were just an admission that something had been broken. Often between two people.”

— Hugh Howey

92. “Explain to them that these people are not evil, which we might understand and combat. Explain to them that these people do not care and cannot be made to, which is far worse.”

— Hugh Howey

93. “Yesterday’s misery had become nostalgic fondness.”

— Hugh Howey

94. “I listen to my voice messages like once a month,” I remind Henry. “You should’ve texted me.”

— Hugh Howey

95. “We like to build on the edge, don’t we? Right on the edge of disaster. Because if we don’t, it leaves room for someone else to build between us and whatever it is we desire. We’re all like Icarus in that way.” Ness points toward the natural jetty to the south. “Let’s walk the shell line this way.”

— Hugh Howey

96. “Look, I’m keeping the power on so they can do whatever it is they do up there, and I can’t get basic supplies. And even when I do, the quality is complete crap, probably because of unrealistic quotas, rushing the manufacturing chain –.”

— Hugh Howey

97. “And I think you’re right. I think I’ll be a little sore in the morning, but I think I’ll feel stronger, eventually.”

— Hugh Howey

98. “Astronauts peer down at the lights of civilization and feel this, I thought. Comfort you can almost reach out and touch. But to cross that gap would kill you. A window in a prison cell.”

— Hugh Howey

99. “He said roughly thirty percent of everything we see is hallucination. It’s our brain smoothing things over so the world’s not so pixelated.”

— Hugh Howey

100. “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