283 Quotes by Hugh Howey

A Poem of Madness Five links stand out in the chain that binds our will. There’s the primal urges, wound tight in nucleotidal strands. There’s the faith that surges through our clasped and superstitious hands. There’s the politics of kings and queens, and their many rules. There’s culture which forms mobs of motley fools. Last comes our decisions, stacked up in piles of regret that we long to forget.

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

Yesterday’s misery had become nostalgic fondness.

Michael had watched his father crawl inside a bottle and die there just so he didn’t have to get up and go to work. It wasn’t long before his mom retreated behind a vacant gaze, leaving him and his sister to pay the bills, to change her stinking bags, to roll her from one sunny patch by the window to another. His mother had become a potted plant they fretted over. No, that wasn’t right. Couldn’t plants at least turn their heads and follow the sun? Weren’t they better than her in that way?

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.

The tweezers weren’t where they were supposed to be. He dug in the bottom of the kit until he found them, cursed the men on other shifts with no respect for their colleagues. It was like living in a dorm, Darcy thought. No, not the right word, the right memory. Like living in a barracks. It was the semblance of order over an underlying mess. Crisp sheets with folded corners over stained mattresses. That’s what this was, people not putting things back where they belonged.

It’s the water beyond the titanium sand that draws me in. Not blue, not even the bright green of a clear lagoon, something more like sea foam. A green so bright it has a tint of yellow. The color of clarity. Of shallow water over white sand.

What if they were all playing the same part? What if each and every one of them was concealing the same doubts, none of them talking because they all felt so completely alone?

That silence seems to build and build, like the darkness I saw once in a cave in West Virginia. Darkness you can chew. Darkness you can feel for miles all around you. Darkness you’re not sure you’ll ever crawl out of.