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.”

“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.”

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

“If the lies don't kill you, the truth will.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Fiction challenges us and works its miracles by placing us in the skin of another human being and teaching us empathy.”

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

“Sleep was a vehicle for passing the time, for avoiding the present. It was a trolley for the depressed, the impatient, and the dying.”

“Maybe he wasn’t there to lead so much as to provide an illusion to the others that they were being led.”

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