Top 200 Hugh Howey Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “I reckon he only ever wanted you to be happy. That’s why he was the man for you.”

— Hugh Howey

152. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

154. “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

155. “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

156. “Don’t leave a man behind – especially not me. It’s.”

— Hugh Howey

157. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

159. “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

160. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

162. “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

163. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

165. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

167. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

172. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

174. “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

175. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

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

— Hugh Howey

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

— Hugh Howey

179. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

181. “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

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

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

— Hugh Howey

185. “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

186. “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

187. “That’s the past, and the past is not the same thing as our Legacy. You’ll need to learn the difference.”

— Hugh Howey

188. “Where’s the everlasting peace? Is there even such a thing? Or do we war like alien races war, eternally, against ourselves?”

— Hugh Howey

189. “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

190. “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

191. “The fact that you are alive is hilarious. The fact that the universe can come to this, that anyone finds it normal, is comically absurd.”

— Hugh Howey

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

— Hugh Howey

193. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

196. “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

197. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

199. “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

200. “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