Wool Hugh Howey Quotes

Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one's conscience to get in the way.

My life is too tight, he wanted to say. My skin is too tight. The walls are too tight.

It turned out that some crooked things looked even worse when straightened. Some tangled knots only made sense once unraveled.

We are born, we are shadows, we cast shadows of own, and then we are gone. All anyone can hope for is to be remembered two shadows deep.

Even in the darkness, his smile threw shadows.

There were certain things, learned so young and remembered so deep that they felt like little stones in the center of her mind.

Better to join a ghost than to be haunted by them. Better no life than an empty one-

He’d only ever seen a gun once, a smaller one on the hip of that old deputy, a gun he’d always figured was more for show. He stuffed a fistful of deadly rounds in his pocket, thinking how each one could end an individual life, and understanding why such things were forbidden. Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one’s conscience to get in the way.

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

Her life was not yet over, she decided. It just felt this way.

It was a sad loss, this illusion of importance, a humbling blow.

What we control," Juliette said, "is our actions once fate puts us there.

You laughed either to keep yourself sane or because you’d given up on staying that way. Either way, you laughed.

We are not the people who made this world, Lukas, but it's up to us to survive it. You need to understand that.” “We can't control where we are right now,” he mumbled, “just what we do going forward.

Better to go out to see the world one time with his own eyes, than to be burned alive with the plastic curtains.

Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one’s conscience to get in the way.

I guess what I'm sayin' is, if you want to give Jules a job, be very careful.” “Why be careful?” Marnes asked. Marck gazed up at the confusion of pipes and wires overhead. “'Cause she'll damn well do it. Even if you don't really expect her to.

A seed of hope caught a taste of moisture. Some wishful kernel buried deep, where he was loathe to acknowledge it lest it poison or choke him, began to sprout.

After a while, you're staying mad just to justify an old mistake. Then it's just a game. Two people staring away, refusing to look back over their shoulders, afraid to be the first one to take that chance.

Wisely and slowly; they stumble that run fast.

I'm coming for you. I'm coming home, I'm coming to clean

Once guns were made, who would unmake them? Barrels rested on shoulders and bristled like pincushions above the crowd. There were things, like spoken ideas, that were almost impossible to take back. And he reckoned his people were about to make many more of them.

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

It's not because we knew” Lukas said, sucking a gasp of air. “It's because we did it.

He was a good man, but he had a broken heart. That’ll take even the best of them down.

We get no credit for being sane, do we? I get no credit. Even from me. From myself. I hold it together and hold it together and I make it another day, another year, and there’s no reward. Nothing great about me being normal. About not being crazy.” He frowned. “Then you have one bad day, and you worry for yourself, you know? It only takes one.

People were like machines. They broke down. They rattled. They could burn you or maim you if you weren't careful. Her job was not only to figure out why this happened and who was to blame, but also to listen for the signs of it coming. Being sheriff, like being a mechanic, was as much the fine art of preventive maintenance as it was the cleaning up after a breakdown.

And now you see why some facts, some pieces of knowledge, have to be snuffed out as soon as they form. Curiosity would blow across such embers and burn this silo to the ground.

It’s always okay to admit when you don’t know something. If you couldn’t do this, you would never truly know anything.

No good coming from the truth? Knowing the truth is always good. And better that it’s us discovering it than someone else, right?

The point of the silo was for the people to keep the machines running, when Jahns had always, her entire long life, seen it the other way around.

She imagined herself at age nine, running through these very halls, crying out to her older self across the years.

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

Juliette felt a wash of fear and relief, those two opposites twisting together like staircase and rail.

Was this how it began? One silly woman with fire in her blood stirring the hearts of a legion of fools?

The animal part of his mind wasn’t made for this, to be calmly ushered to a death it was perfectly aware of.

He nearly tripped and fell down the last few steps, his legs not used to an end to the descent, a flat piece of ground rather than one more tread to sink to.

Perhaps, with enough time in these walls, one could become resigned to things never getting better, or even changing all that much. Or maybe a person eventually lost hope that there was anything worth preserving at all.

Imagination, she figured, 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. It would be like telling someone what sex felt like, or an orgasm. Impossible. But once you felt it yourself, you could then imagine varying degrees of this new sensation.

It was amazing to Knox that they all knew, instinctively, how to build implements of pain. It was something even shadows knew how to do at a young age, knowledge somehow dredged up from the brutal depths of their imagination, this ability to deal harm to one another.

What we do going forward defines who we are.

I’m coming for you. I’m coming home, and I’m coming to clean.

One of the things she loved about having [him] around was that his thoughts could be so black as to make hers shine gray.

Were they dead forever, like Allison?

You could mix the known, but you couldn’t create the strange out of nothing.

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.

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.

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.

The suit came up, and Holston thought that maybe people went along with it because they couldn't believe it was happening. None of it was real enough to rebel against. The animal part of his mind wasn't made for this, to be calmly ushered to a death it was perfectly aware of.

None of us asked to be where we are,” she reminded him coolly. This gave Lukas pause, thinking of where she was, what she'd been through to get there. “What we control,” Juliette said, “is our actions once fate puts us there.

He had wandered with innocence and naivete into this web, and now every move would wrap him tighter. Each lie would stick to the others, until one day he would find himself in a tight little cocoon, trapped and suffocating from the thousands of little fibs that living and working in that cursed swamp of a city seemed to require every man to ooze.

It made her sad, thinking about the consequences of their anger, their thirst for revenge. Her husband was gone, ripped from her, and for what? People were dying, and for what? She thought how things could've gone so differently, how they'd had all these dreams, unrealistic perhaps, of a real change in power, an easy fix to impossible and intractable problems. Back then she'd been unfairly treaded, but at least she'd been safe. There had been injustice, but she'd been in love. Did that make it okay? Which sacrifice made more sense?

Even knowing it wasn’t real, knowing that she was looking through an eight by twoinch fib, the temptation was overwhelming to believe.

She rubbed the charcoal letters with her fingers, transferring some of her friends' black thoughts to herself.

The cycle of life is here. It is inescapable. It is to be embraced, cherished, appreciated. One departs and leaves behind the gift of sustenance, of life.

Thank you,” she said, remembering her manners. And then, after some consideration: “I’m sorry I fell asleep.

He was an easy man to figure, one of those who had grown old everywhere but in his heart, that one organ he had never worn out because he’d never dared to use it.

people were like machines. They broke down. They rattled. They could burn you or maim you if you weren’t careful.

The law is the law. You broke it. You knew you were breaking it.

And I think you’re right. I think I’ll be a little sore in the morning, but I think I’ll feel stronger, eventually.

He sounded flustered. Juliette watched him busy about the stove, his movements jerky and manic, and realized she was the one cloistered away and ignorant, not him. He had all these books, decades of reading history, the company of ancestors she could only imagine. What did she have as her experience? A life in a dark hole with thousands of fellow, ignorant savages? She tried to remember this as she watched him dig a finger in his ear and then inspect his fingernail.

As he entered the comm room, Troy wasn’t sure if he should laugh or cry at the realization. Then he remembered how the world was run before, and that nothing had really changed. He chuckled sadly

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.

She gifted him with a rare grin, and Knox felt himself beaming in return. And right then he knew, instantly, why her people were devoted to her. It was similar to the pull he had on others, but for different reasons. People feared him and wanted to feel safe. But they respected McLain and wanted to feel loved.

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.

We can’t control where we are right now,” he mumbled, “just what we do going forward.

It was always over the doubt, the suspicion, that things weren't as bad out there as they seemed. You've felt that, right? That we could be anywhere, living a lie?

Walker was the one who had taught Scottie that it’s always okay to admit when you don’t know something. If you couldn’t do this, you would never truly know anything.

What god would make so much rock below and air above and just a measly silo between?

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.

What seemed a fine adventure at sunrise now seemed a mighty undertaking.

That always amazed him: how centuries of bare palms and shuffling feet could wear down solid steel.

Bernard said this last word like it was full of nails and might gut him to spit it out.

Sorry for her loss. And he had hugged her. Like he knew what she was holding inside, this secret grief that had hardened where her hidden love once lay.

Woke to a bed familiarly empty, but a heart strangely full.

If I’ve learned one thing from my job, it’s that no crime or crazy mob is ever all that original.

There, on that hill, his wife could be seen. She lay like a sleeping boulder, the air and toxins wearing away at her, her arms curled under her head. Maybe.

We are born, we are shadows, we cast shadows of our own, and then we are gone. All anyone can hope for is to be remembered two shadows deep.

She was often in danger of forgetting what she was.

One silly woman with fire in her blood stirring the hearts of a legion of fools?

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

People didn’t talk softer, they just sounded that way. They didn’t stand further from her, they just seemed more distant.

Bones buried with bones, keeping the secrets held between them safe.

That secret was a powerful drug.

I’ve been deputy almost as long as you’ve been mayor, Ma’am. Don’t figure on being nothing else but dead one day.

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

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—

The short-term rage to be sated at the end of a barrel was too easy to act on. Staving off extinction required something else, something with more vision, something impossibly patient.

There had been a slice of time, somewhere sliding away from him now and fading into the slippery past, where Walker had been a happy man. Where his life should've ended to keep him from enduring any of the suffering beyond. But he had made it through that brief bliss and now could hardly recall it. He couldn't imagine what it felt like to rise with anticipation every morning, to fall asleep with contentment at the end of every day.

One departs and leaves behind the gift of sustenance, of life. They make room for the next generation. We are born, we are shadows, we cast shadows of our own, and then we are gone. All anyone can hope for is to be remembered two shadows deep.

The silo was something she had always taken for granted. The priests say it had always been here, that it was lovingly created by a caring God, that everything they would ever need had been provided for. Juliette had a hard time with this story.

Imagination, she figured, just wasn't up to the task of understanding unique and foreign sensations. It only knew how to dampen or augment what it already knew. It would be like telling someone what sex felt like, or an orgasm. Impossible. But once you felt it yourself, you could then imagine varying degrees of this new sensation. It was the same as color. You could only describe a new color in terms of hues previously seen. You could mix the known, but you couldn't create the strange out of nothing.

All our hope, the accomplishments of those before us, what the world can be like, that’s our Legacy.” Bernard’s lips broke into a smile. He waved his hand to continue. “And the bad things that can’t be stopped, the mistakes that got us here, that’s the past.

Juliette had somehow crossed an uninhabitable void, had gone from one universe to another, was possibly the first ever to have done so, and here was a graveyard of foreign souls, of people just like her having lived and died in a world so similar and so near to her own.

The futility, dread, and exhaustion from the day before were gone. All that remained was a small twinge of fear that these dour feelings could return, that this exuberant elation was a temporary high, that if she stopped, if she thought on it too long, it would spiral away and leave her dark and moody once more.

Holston lifted an old boot to an old step, pressed down, and did it again. He lost himself in what the untold years had done, the ablation of molecules and lives, layers and layers ground to fine dust. And he thought, not for the first time, that neither life nor staircase had been meant for such an existence. The tight confines of that long spiral, threading

How long?” Juliette laughed and shook her head. She finished a final adjustment and turned to face them with her arms crossed. “It could happen right now. It could happen a hundred years from now. The point is: it’s going to happen, and it’s entirely preventable. The goal shouldn’t be to keep this place humming along for our lifetimes”—she looked pointedly at Jahns—“or our current term. If the goal ain’t forever, we should pack our bags right now.

We are the seeds,” he said. “This is a silo. They put us here for the bad times........But it won’t work.” He shook his head, then sat back on the floor and peered at the pictures in the massive book. “You can’t leave seeds this long,” he said. “Not in the dark like this. Nope......What do seeds do when they’re left too long?” she asked him. He frowned. “We rot,” he said. “All of us. We go bad down here, and we rot so deep that we won’t grow anymore.” He blinked and looked up at her. “We’ll never grow again.

It only looked depressing compared to scenes from the children’s books—the only books to survive the uprising. Most people doubted those colors in the books, just as they doubted purple elephants and pink birds ever existed, but Holston felt that they were truer than the scene before him. He, like some others, felt something primal and deep when he looked at those worn pages splashed green and blue. Even so, when compared to the stifling silo, that muddy gray view outside looked like some kind of salvation, just the sort of open air men were born to breathe. “Always seems a little clearer in here,” Jahns said. “The view, I mean.” Holston remained silent. He watched a curling piece of cloud break off and move in a new direction, blacks and grays swirling together. “You get your pick for dinner,” the mayor said. “It’s tradition—” “You don’t need to tell me how this works,” Holston said, cutting Jahns off. “It’s only been three years since I served Allison her last meal right here.” He reached to spin the copper ring on his finger out of habit, forgetting he had left it on his dresser hours ago.

Footsteps came to her, nearly invisible in the worn carpet. There were no words, just the creaking of old joints as they approached the bed, the lifting of expensive and fragrant sheets, and an understanding between two living ghosts. Jahns's breath caught in her chest. Her hand groped for a wrist as it clutched her sheets. She slid over on the small convertible bed to make room, and pulled him down beside her. Marnes wrapped his arms around her back, wiggled beneath her until she was lying on his side, a leg draped over his, her hands on his neck. She felt his moustach brush against her cheek, heard his lips purse and peck the corner of hers. Jahns held his cheeks and burrowed her face into his shoulder. She cried, like a schoolchild, like a new shadow who felt lost and afraid in the wilderness of a strange and terrifying job. She cried with fear, but that soon drained away. It drained like the soreness in her back as his hands rubbed her there. It drained until numbness found its place, and then, after what felt like a forever of shuddering sobs, sensation took over. Jahns felt alive in her skin. She felt the tingle of flesh touching flesh, of just her forearm against his hard ribs, her hands on his shoulder, his hands on her hips. And then the tears were some joyous release, some mourning of the lost time, some welcomed sadness of a moment long delayed and finally there, arms wrapped around it and holding tight. She fell asleep like that, exhausted from far more than the climb, nothing more than a few trembling kisses, hands interlocking, a whispered word of tenderness and appreciation, and then the depths of sleep pulling her down, the weariness in her joints and bones succumbing to a slumber she didn't want but sorely needed. She slept with a man in her arms for the first time in decades, and woke to a bed familiarly empty, but a heart strangely full.