Top 200 Hugh Howey Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

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

— Hugh Howey

154. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

156. “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

157. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

159. “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

160. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

162. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

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

— Hugh Howey

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

— Hugh Howey

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

— Hugh Howey

167. “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

168. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

170. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

177. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

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

— Hugh Howey

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

185. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

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

— Hugh Howey

188. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

190. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

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

— Hugh Howey

193. “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

194. “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

195. “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

196. “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

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

— Hugh Howey

198. “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

199. “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

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

— Hugh Howey