Top 200 Hugh Howey Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 5

151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “No life had ever been truly saved, not in the history of mankind. They were merely prolonged. Everything comes to an end.”

— Hugh Howey

159. “What felt interminable the first time now passes with a quickness borne of familiarity. It makes me wonder if life seems to accelerate as we get older simply because our days and our experiences become routine. The things we recognize flash right by, where once they held our attention. Only the new bears careful contemplation, and the new gets harder and harder to come by.”

— Hugh Howey

160. “Montana wants to scream, but the thing she is angry at is in the past. The past can’t hear her. This is the thing, her great discovery. She smiles at the future. Happiness is a choice.”

— Hugh Howey

161. “The food in Silo One came from cans. Their bodies returned to the same.”

— Hugh Howey

162. “And she knew it was time to start getting the images of dead things out of her mind. Or at least, to bury them a while.”

— Hugh Howey

163. “I remember the rule for semicolons; the sentences on both sides have to be full ones.”

— Hugh Howey

164. “Ahead, twin rows of crape myrtles dot the road. They’re losing their flowers. Purple petals ring the trunks, fallen mementos of a past bloom like photos from college years. But unlike people, trees flower again in the spring; they age in great looping circles. We ride a roller coaster once around, shuddering up clacking tracks and then screaming our fool heads off all the way down.”

— Hugh Howey

165. “Little fictions. That’s what her father called them. Not lies, just stories to twist the brain into a new shape, to allow the light to spill in with a different color, to throw rainbows instead of shadows.”

— Hugh Howey

166. “The races I study still employ their immune systems, and the parallels between those systems and us as a race are striking. For we have become what Earthlings would call white blood cells. We remove foreign bodies from the cosmos. And every one leaves an imprint, a bauble of tech or a new idea, all of which we neatly coil into our lives, into our molecular structure. We are an immune system, and we are immune to death. This last, alas, is our curse.”

— Hugh Howey

167. “But what if we are more indomitable than we realize? What if we’re not so fragile after all? There are colonies of ants that most humans are wise enough to steer around.”

— Hugh Howey

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

— Hugh Howey

169. “It hit her like a loved one turning his back while she was falling, like some great bond that wasn’t simply taken away but never truly existed.”

— Hugh Howey

170. “Juliette trusted the darkness to conceal her smile.”

— Hugh Howey

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

— Hugh Howey

172. “The ice on the next pane was already disturbed, had been wiped away by someone recently. Beads of condensation stood like tiny lenses warping the light. He rubbed the glass and knew what had happened. He saw the woman inside with the auburn hair that she sometimes kept in a bun. This was not his wife. This was someone who wanted that, wanted him like that. ‘Hello?’ Troy turned toward the voice.”

— Hugh Howey

173. “This is the missing episode of Planet Earth, he realized. They never did a show on the most bizarre life form of them all: humans.”

— Hugh Howey

174. “Sleep was a vehicle for passing the time, for avoiding the present.”

— Hugh Howey

175. “And the only thing that ends a war like this is trust, release, love for those we hate, arms around those who would kill us, forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness.”

— Hugh Howey

176. “Maybe God would hear her thoughts and rat her out.”

— Hugh Howey

177. “The lives lost are of less consequence than the spoils gained.”

— Hugh Howey

178. “How many laws could she break now that she was in a position to uphold them all?”

— Hugh Howey

179. “She stood still, feeling his presence on the other side of those bars, this boy who knew about stars but nothing about her.”

— Hugh Howey

180. “But a stronger impulse seized the popular imagination: the ability to be great overnight. It was a new type of lottery, one where fame and talent were won rather than simple money.”

— Hugh Howey

181. “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.” “Makes.”

— Hugh Howey

182. “I bang my head on a pipe. We both laugh. “This thing was not built for this,” I say.”

— Hugh Howey

183. “I think that, with a lot of art, you just have to be bad at it a long time before the magic happens.”

— Hugh Howey

184. “There was something about being sent to one’s death and surviving a baptism of fire upon one’s return that pushed most squabblings into the deepest recesses of one’s mind.”

— Hugh Howey

185. “This is what happens when they give you medals for breaking the rules: you forget the rules apply to you.”

— Hugh Howey

186. “The Wrath is what Peter named my mood before eight in the morning. Our marriage might’ve survived if we’d only had to do afternoons.”

— Hugh Howey

187. “She desperately missed her watch. All she had these days was her knife. She laughed at the switch, at having gone from counting the seconds in her life to fending for each and every one of them.”

— Hugh Howey

188. “Living frugally is one of the best things an author can do to prepare for their career.”

— Hugh Howey

189. “A soul can’t be pinned and made to heal. It has to be talked into stillness and quietude. It has to want it.”

— Hugh Howey

190. “I also remember catching the eye of the few conscientious objectors in the terminal, the people opposed to the war but afraid to speak up. There was no hate in their eyes, only pity. Sadness. Knowledge that I might be necessary, but that we shouldn’t be proud that I was necessary. That’s how I saw myself and my company by the end of my second tour. I didn’t hate what we did so much as hate the need for it all. No one should applaud this. We should bow our heads not in thanks but in sadness.”

— Hugh Howey

191. “It wasn’t until after the body was scarred by a brush with danger that it learned fear. Conner thought of all the untouched places on his soul yet to teach him something. All the unblemished parts of him waiting for that razor of truth.”

— Hugh Howey

192. “Her twitching muscles felt near enough like wracking sobs. Struggling on that table felt near enough like times she’d clutched her knees and sobbed quietly in the tub. Life and love. When the bad parts crept in, sometimes she wished it would end. Wished there was some quick way out for cowards. She loved her husband, wasn’t sure how not to, but sometimes she sat in the tub with the water running dangerously hot and wanted out. Like now, just wanting to die.”

— Hugh Howey

193. “She felt like a speck of sand in an alien land, confused as to how it had gotten there.”

— Hugh Howey

194. “Eventually, it was something else that slipped away, something else you lost that tumbled down through the heart of the silo, that made you ponder leaping after –.”

— Hugh Howey

195. “Go quietly, and you’re a number. Go in spectacular fashion, and you’re a name.”

— Hugh Howey

196. “We survive in order to struggle. Struggling means we’re winning.”

— Hugh Howey

197. “How could any of them not see where they were going? They’d been going around and around in tiny circles, had been for years, years that sat heavy in the gut of the living. And this was what made stomachs turn: it was the weight of all that time wasted. It was the seconds and minutes and hours, the true nectar of life, gorged on hungrily and thoughtlessly, forever undigestible, everyone hungry for more.”

— Hugh Howey

198. “The past lives on forever. There’s no changing it.”

— Hugh Howey

199. “What she had forever seen as her calling – this living apart and serving the greater good – now felt more a curse. Her life had been taken from her. Squeezed into pulp. The juice of her efforts and sacrificed years had dripped down through a silo that, just forty levels below her, hardly knew and barely cared.”

— Hugh Howey

200. “She used to admire people who stood out, but now she could feel herself wary of them.”

— Hugh Howey