“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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“There were numerous physical combats between husbands and wives, and not always the husbands that matched the wives. Kitty Hofman, for instance, had been given a black eye by Carter Davis when she kicked him in the groin for dunking her head in a punch bowl for calling him a son of a bitch for telling her she looked like something the cat dragged in. And so on.”
― John O'Hara, quote from Appointment in Samarra
“But there I was, surrendering to a most extraordinary call from the grave, the mass-grave-to-be of Europe, as if somewhere ahead lay an iron gateway, slightly ajar, leading to a low and sombre country, with an incalculable crowd on sides eager to pass into it, and bearing me along.”
― Thomas Pynchon, quote from Against the Day
“How could I do it, how could a person go that low? And I understand your question, to which I reply, Are you kidding? That's nothing. I'd been much lower than that. And I expected to see myself do worse.”
― Denis Johnson, quote from Jesus' Son
“Robert rushed to the gravel-pit, found the Psammead, and presently wished for— But that, too, is another story.”
― E. Nesbit, quote from Five Children and It
“No, Sully'd decided long ago to abstain from all but the most general forms of regret. He allowed himself the vague wish that things had turned out differently, without blaming himself that they hadn't, any more than he'd blamed himself when his 1-2-3 triple never ran like it should at least once. It didn't pay to second-guess every one of life's decisions, to pretend to wisdom about the past from the safety of the present, the way so many people did when they got older. As if, given a second chance to live their lives, they'd be smarter. Sully didn't know too many people who got noticeably smarter over the course of a lifetime. Some made fewer mistakes, but in Sully's opinion that was because they couldn't go quite so fast. They had less energy, no more virtue; fewer opportunities to screw up, not more wisdom. It was Sully's policy to stick by his mistakes....”
― Richard Russo, quote from Nobody's Fool
The Fisherman's Lady
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The Garden of the Fi...
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