Top 200 Hugh Howey Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “You make us fear each other, fear you, and so we send our own people out, and the world gets poisoned by our hate and our fear, doesn’t it?” “I.”

— Hugh Howey

105. “I wonder how many times we’ve been on this precipice only to delete what we can’t understand. And then thinking we can just copy it back, and find that it’s been lost. I wonder if this is why downloading the human consciousness has been such a dead end. Like there’s some bit of complexity there that can’t survive duplication.”

— Hugh Howey

106. “The short-term rage to be sated at the end of a barrel was too easy to act on. Staving off extinction required something else, something with more vision, something impossibly patient.”

— Hugh Howey

107. “No more waiting for things to break before we fix them, but to go around and make them hum while they’re still working. Too many issues have been ignored, let degrade.”

— Hugh Howey

108. “You just lean into each step, and before you know it, you’re home.”

— Hugh Howey

109. “He turned the coin over and over and contemplated the only thing unusual about him holding a trinket from a world fallen to ashes – and that was him being around to marvel at the loss. It was supposed to be people who died and cultures that lasted. Now, it was the other way around;.”

— Hugh Howey

110. “Run, we think, as buildings crumble. Run, as people perish.”

— Hugh Howey

111. “By the time you’re reading this warning, you’ve already acted responsibly.”

— Hugh Howey

112. “There were certain things, learned so young and remembered so deep that they felt like little stones in the center of her mind.”

— Hugh Howey

113. “This is not the end, of course. Every story we read, every film we watch, continues in our imagination if we allow it.”

— Hugh Howey

114. “I wanted to leave my decision-making behind, along with my responsibility for all future ones.”

— Hugh Howey

115. “In every wreck and crash, there is some unseen man rubbing his hands with thoughts of tidy profits.”

— Hugh Howey

116. “The mind rejects the very things worth knowing.”

— Hugh Howey

117. “Was this how it began? One silly woman with fire in her blood stirring the hearts of a legion of fools?”

— Hugh Howey

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

— Hugh Howey

119. “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

120. “If I’ve learned one thing from my job, it’s that no crime or crazy mob is ever all that original.”

— Hugh Howey

121. “Evan Price is not a man to be questioned. He is a man who will question you.”

— Hugh Howey

122. “The law is the law. You broke it. You knew you were breaking it.”

— Hugh Howey

123. “Being cooped up was not new. Living in the middle of a desert wasteland where it wasn’t safe to go out was not new. Being surrounded by men she ought to fear was not new. Stationed in Iraq during the Second Iranian War, Charlotte had grown accustomed to these things, to not leaving base, to not wanting to leave her bunk or a bathroom stall. She was used to this struggle to keep sane. It was mental as much as physical exercise that was required.”

— Hugh Howey

124. “Juliette had somehow crossed an uninhabitable void, had gone from one universe to another, was possibly the first ever to have done so, and here was a graveyard of foreign souls, of people just like her having lived and died in a world so similar and so near to her own.”

— Hugh Howey

125. “Her first thought was of food. The ding meant Donny bringing her food.”

— Hugh Howey

126. “We shouldn’t go after these people for what they did. No. We should go after them for what they’re capable of doing. Before they do it again.”

— Hugh Howey

127. “Juliette felt a wash of fear and relief, those two opposites twisting together like staircase and rail.”

— Hugh Howey

128. “Memories of bright and colorful worlds swirl together. The one thing in common is the brown mud on my boots. Slogging through battlefields. Noticing details like how the insides of sentient things have much in common: the same blood that colors red in the air, the sacs for breathing, the sacs for pumping blood through tubes, the tendrils for turning thoughts into things.”

— Hugh Howey

129. “Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear. -Baruch Spinoza.”

— Hugh Howey

130. “Emotions don’t know how to stitch back the way flesh could. How do you go to a person, your wife of two decades, and tell her you want to start over again? How do you say, “Forget everything we’ve got together. Forget the kids and the fights and all the good times, too. I take it all back.” How do you do that? It ain’t a lizard’s tail, those years. It ain’t something you walk away from and start over.”

— Hugh Howey

131. “He turns to me. There’s a look on his face that makes him appear a decade younger. A look of wonder and discovery. I remember falling in love with that look.”

— Hugh Howey

132. “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.”

— Hugh Howey

133. “And Rocky still sounds angry at me for drilling a hole through his skull. I only did it to keep him close. Woulda lost him otherwise. Do we have to hurt the ones we love to keep them close?”

— Hugh Howey

134. “No one should applaud this. We should bow our heads not in thanks but in sadness.”

— Hugh Howey

135. “He knew from hacking Human laptops that all their passwords were slight variations on a single theme – either their limited noses kept them ignorant to the threats swirling all around them, or they just couldn’t hold more than a few tidbits in their brains at any one time.”

— Hugh Howey

136. “I’m a chipper guy, once you get to know the raw, dark dread and petrified fear that lurks in my breast and that I battle with every waking moment and that sometimes has me sobbing into my palms when no one is around and makes it really hard to be in crowds or to stand any loud sounds and has me thinking I’ll probably never be in a functional relationship again, platonic or otherwise. Once you get that, you have to say to yourself, “Hey, why’s this guy so damn happy all the time?”

— Hugh Howey

137. “This was the sort of cruelty that only came from turned backs, from being ignored. Well-aimed lashes and direct blows were more easily understood. At least then the stricken knew their anguished cries were being heard.”

— Hugh Howey

138. “That hotshot pilot who buzzed the Hudson is forgotten. Here is something new. The boom and the smoke – these two things are unrelated in my mind.”

— Hugh Howey

139. “She would survive, she realized. But it would be a different her. It would be someone else who did the surviving, who would drag memories of a former self along, a tiny echo of a woman somewhere deep in her skull, a small voice of who she used to be.”

— Hugh Howey

140. “She was often in danger of forgetting what she was.”

— Hugh Howey

141. “I reckon he only ever wanted you to be happy. That’s why he was the man for you.”

— Hugh Howey

142. “This is the problem with illusions: They form easy enough, but once they fall apart, they’re impossible to put back together. They’re like humans in that way.”

— Hugh Howey

143. “We are all of us – everywhere and at all times – mere visitors.”

— Hugh Howey

144. “What was any group but a bunch of people? And what were people but animals as prone to fear as rats at the sound of boots? “ – catch.”

— Hugh Howey

145. “Another thing I noticed was how quickly the human brain paired causal events. “A” leads to “B.” We love to make that link, however tenuous.”

— Hugh Howey

146. “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

147. “It was what to replace injustice with that very few gave thought to.”

— Hugh Howey

148. “There is no uprising, not really, there’s just a gradual leak. Just the people who know, who want out.”

— Hugh Howey

149. “The cycle of life is here. It is inescapable. It is to be embraced, cherished, appreciated. One departs and leaves behind the gift of sustenance, of life.”

— Hugh Howey

150. “What if they were all playing the same part? What if each and every one of them was concealing the same doubts, none of them talking because they all felt so completely alone?”

— Hugh Howey