“Health and understanding seem to intersect in one’s forties, the one peaking as the other begins its slow ascent. Maybe you’ll know one day what you should’ve taken the time to appreciate.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from I, Zombie
“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, quote from I, Zombie
“Youthful vigor becomes more rot than wisdom. Hopeful optimism is battered by harsh reality. Health and understanding seem to intersect in one’s forties, the one peaking as the other begins its slow ascent. Maybe you’ll know one day what you should’ve taken the time to appreciate. Maybe it’ll be when your knees start popping, when your hands no longer work like they should. It probably won’t be any sooner.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from I, Zombie
“Time slipped away in a familiar manner, and love dwindled as it was tossed back and forth in the form of arguments. It could only go away, everything she saw and everywhere she looked. Money. It disappeared from her accounts no matter how hard she tried to save. Time and love and wealth and anything worth building or wrapping one’s arms around, trying to hold on to it all, eroding like the cascade of sand between two palms, stolen by the breeze.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from I, Zombie
“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, quote from I, Zombie
“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?”
― Hugh Howey, quote from I, Zombie
“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, quote from I, Zombie
“Emotions don’t know how to stitch back the way flesh could. How do you go to a person, your wife of two decades, and tell her you want to start over again? How do you say, “Forget everything we’ve got together. Forget the kids and the fights and all the good times, too. I take it all back.” How do you do that? It ain’t a lizard’s tail, those years. It ain’t something you walk away from and start over.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from I, Zombie
“his balding head a tiny raft bobbing on a sea of pedestrians.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from I, Zombie
“sizing up the two young couples they’d murdered in their sleep.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from I, Zombie
“What was it about this city, with its endless possibilities, that elicited such limited routines?”
― Hugh Howey, quote from I, Zombie
“Unaware that anyone other than her suffered at all.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from I, Zombie
“However it started, there was a chain of blame that linked them all together.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from I, Zombie
“removed her flesh piece by gory piece. They aren’t here to save me, she realized.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from I, Zombie
“When sick men refuse to die. When innocent men find something to be guilty of.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from I, Zombie
“The Swooping Birds that Caught Her Eyes”
― Hugh Howey, quote from I, Zombie
“the streets outside full of the silent traffic of darting candy bar wrappers”
― Hugh Howey, quote from I, Zombie
“a picked-clean skeleton sitting there in one of ‘em with its seatbelt still on like it might crank the engine”
― Hugh Howey, quote from I, Zombie
“The greenery beckoned. It invited her in with the scent of hidden survivors,”
― Hugh Howey, quote from I, Zombie
“He had been fourteen when the planes hit.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from I, Zombie
“origami nests until a brave soul—the sports page or classifieds—tore off and flapped to freedom.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from I, Zombie
“Cars lay scattered like some god-child had been playing with them before losing interest,”
― Hugh Howey, quote from I, Zombie
Hugh Howey
Born place: in Charlotte, NC, The United States
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“It's hard to believe that this is how it's done. That this is how we get here into the world, by accident or design, the microscopic pieces of ourselves borne by fluids and blood and growing into a tiny kingdom of cells inside someone else's body. It seems so difficult to become alive. So improbable. . .
How can it be possible? she wonders. How can you come to understand your life when even the beginning is so complicated: a single cell imprinted with the color of your eyes and the shape of your face, the pattern on your palm and the moods that will shadow you through your life. How can you be alive when every choice you make breaks the world into a thousand filaments, each careless step branching into long tributaries of alternate lives, shuddering outward and outward like sheet lightning.”
― Dan Chaon, quote from You Remind Me of Me
“What was your secret?"
That brought another smile. "Learn to laugh, otherwise, you'll beat them to death with a hammer first chance”
― Nora Roberts, quote from Blood Brothers
“I think you're under no obligation whatsoever to forgive anything, to forget anything. You're not required to push away the years of abuse because the abuser now chooses to be sober and in his sobriety regrets his actions. And white may be small and unforgiving of me, I think people who do so at the snap of a dam finger are either liars or are in need of serious therapy. I assume you heard him out, so in my personal opinion, any debt you might owe for your existence is now paid in full. It may be fashionable to hold that terrible actions are indeed terrible, but that hte person inflicting them isn't responbile due to alcohol, drugs, DNA, or GD PMS. He damn well was responsible, and if you decided to loathe him for the rest of your life, I wouldn't blame you for it. How's that?" (Cybil to Gage - she ROCKS)”
― Nora Roberts, quote from The Pagan Stone
“Ceil moaned. Mattie rocked. Propelled by the sound, Mattie rocked her out of that bed, out of that room, into a blue vastness just underneath the sun and above time. She rocked her over Aegean seas so clean they shine like crystal, so clear the fresh blood of sacrificed babies torn from their mothers arms and given to Neptune could be seen like pink froth on the water. She rocked her on and on, past Dachau, where soul-gutted Jewish mothers swept their children's entrails off laboratory floors. They flew past the spilled brains of Senegalese infants whose mothers had dashed them on the wooden sides of slave ships. And she rocked on.
She rocked her into her childhood and let her see murdered dreams. And she rocked her back, back into the womb, to the nadir of her hurt, and they found it-a slight silver splinter, embedded just below the surface of her skin. And Mattie rocked and pulled-and the splinter gave way, but its roots were deep, gigantic, ragged, and they tore up flesh with bits of fat and muscle tissue clinging to them. They left a huge hole, which was already starting to pus over, but Mattie was satisfied. It would heal.”
― Gloria Naylor, quote from The Women of Brewster Place
“Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar. You have to hold it, you have to read it.”
― Ben Elton, quote from Blind Faith
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The Sword of Shannar...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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