“I hated Sundays as a kid. From the moment I woke up, I could feel Monday looming, could feel another school week all piled up and ready to smother me. How was I supposed to enjoy a day of freedom while drowning in dread like that? It was impossible. A pit would form in my chest and gut—this indescribable emptiness that I knew should be filled with fun, but instead left me casting about for something to do. Knowing I should be having fun was a huge part of the problem. Knowing that this was a rare day off, a welcome reprieve, and here I was miserable and fighting against it. Maybe this was why Fridays at school were better than Sundays not in school. I was happier doing what I hated, knowing a Saturday was coming, than I was on a perfectly free Sunday with a Monday right around the corner.”— Hugh Howey
“To impatient youth, all things took for ever and any kind of waiting was torture. Pg. 221”— Hugh Howey
“This was the mark of deep infatuation, he thought: the desire to watch a woman talk just to see her lips move, to be around her.”— Hugh Howey
“There were certain things, learned so young and remembered so deep that they felt like little stones in the center of her mind. These would be the parts of her that rotted last, the bits left over once the rest skittered off on the wind or was drunk deep by the roots.”— Hugh Howey
“He continued to see inevitable events from the past as avoidable, long after they’d taken their course.”— Hugh Howey
“Imagination just wasn’t up to the task of understanding unique and foreign sensations. It knew only how to dampen or augment what it already knew. – Juliette, Pg. 139”— Hugh Howey
“Sleep was a vehicle for passing the time, for avoiding the present. It was a trolley for the depressed, the impatient, and the dying.”— Hugh Howey
“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
“You die a little inside every time you have joyless sex. Neurons prune back. The good in there withers. And some things never grow back.”— Hugh Howey
“just know that it takes a bit of courage to unlearn that shame, and to be there for others when they try to unlearn that shame, and that it all gets easier after you feel how healthy it is.”— Hugh Howey
“She could tell he was heading toward a bad place. She had seen him go there often enough, knew he had shortcuts he could take to get there in no time.”— Hugh Howey
“Fiction challenges us and works its miracles by placing us in the skin of another human being and teaching us empathy.”— Hugh Howey
“Where’s the everlasting peace? Is there even such a thing? Or do we war like alien races war, eternally, against ourselves?”— Hugh Howey
“Maybe he wasn’t there to lead so much as to provide an illusion to the others that they were being led.”— Hugh Howey
“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