Top 200 Hugh Howey Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

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

— Hugh Howey

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

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

— Hugh Howey

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

— Hugh Howey

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

— Hugh Howey

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

— Hugh Howey

111. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

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

— Hugh Howey

124. “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

125. “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

126. “Sheltering the women and the children played some part; Troy was sure of that. The women and children of Silo One had been gifted with a long sleep while the men stayed and took shifts. It removed the passion from the plans, forestalled the chance that the men might fight among themselves.”

— Hugh Howey

127. “They were not battling a trained warrior – this was a politician. Pity stirred, then recoiled from her rising wrath. This was the sort of beast that killed with calculations, concocting war and disease and wiping out millions from the safety of a council meeting. She.”

— Hugh Howey

128. “And Lukas would tell them to be good to each other, that there were only so many of them left, and that all the books and all the stars in the universe were pointless with no one to read them, no one to peer through the parting clouds for them.”

— Hugh Howey

129. “Humans have this disease, Donny, this compulsion to move until we bump into something. And then we tunnel through that something, or we sail over the edge of the oceans, or we stagger across mountains –.”

— Hugh Howey

130. “All great discoveries were like this. It was the rare souls full of hope who showed the world what could be done; and then came the thundering herds, those doubters and naysayers who had once put up barriers, now shoving everyone out of their way.”

— Hugh Howey

131. “His response was that it was a burden doing what he knew to be correct, to be sound and logical.’ Erskine ran one hand across the pod as if he could touch his daughter within. ‘And how much simpler things would be, how much better for us all, if we had people brave enough to do what was right, instead.”

— Hugh Howey

132. “I’d rather excite the imagination of a legion of readers and make pennies from each of them than hold off for a larger chunk of change from only a handful of fans.”

— Hugh Howey

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

— Hugh Howey

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

— Hugh Howey

135. “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

136. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

138. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

140. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

142. “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

143. “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

144. “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

145. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

147. “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

148. “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

149. “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

150. “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