“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.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“It turned out that some crooked things looked even worse when straightened. Some tangled knots only made sense once unraveled.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“Even in the darkness, his smile threw shadows.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“Better to join a ghost than to be haunted by them. Better no life than an empty one-”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“Her life was not yet over, she decided. It just felt this way.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“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.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“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.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“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.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“It was a sad loss, this illusion of importance, a humbling blow.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“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.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“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.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“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.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“Wisely and slowly; they stumble that run fast.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“If the lies don't kill you, the truth will.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“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.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“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.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“He continued to see inevitable events from the past as avoidable, long after they'd taken their course.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“You laughed either to keep yourself sane or because you’d given up on staying that way. Either way, you laughed.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“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.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“He was a good man, but he had a broken heart. That’ll take even the best of them down.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“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.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“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.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“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.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“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.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“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.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“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.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“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?”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“Juliette felt a wash of fear and relief, those two opposites twisting together like staircase and rail.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“Was this how it began? One silly woman with fire in her blood stirring the hearts of a legion of fools?”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
“It’s always okay to admit when you don’t know something. If you couldn’t do this, you would never truly know anything.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus
Hugh Howey
Born place: in Charlotte, NC, The United States
See more on GoodReads
“SCIENTISTS HAD KNOWN since the late nineteenth century that tobacco smoke contains carbon monoxide. Victorian scientists had even been able to calculate the amount of gas in the smoke: up to 4 percent in cigarette smoke, and in Gettler’s own choice of tobacco, the cigar, between 6 and 8 percent. Gettler’s latest work theorized that chain smokers might suffer from low-level carbon monoxide poisoning. He speculated in a 1933 report that “headaches experienced by heavy smokers are due in part to the inhalation of carbon monoxide.” But his real interest lay less in their symptoms than in how much of the poison had accumulated in their blood, and how that might affect his calculations on cause of death. He approached that problem in his usual, single-minded way. To get a better sense of carbon monoxide contamination from smoking tobacco, Gettler selected three groups of people to compare: persons confined to a state institution in the relatively clean air of the country; street cleaners who worked in a daily, dusty cloud of car exhaust; and heavy smokers. As expected, carboxyhemoglobin blood levels for country dwellers averaged less than 1 percent saturation. The levels for Manhattan street cleaners were triple that amount, a solid 3 percent. But smokers came in the highest, higher than he’d expected, well above the nineteenth-century calculations. Americans were inhaling a lot more tobacco smoke than they had once done, and their saturation levels ranged from 8 to 19 percent. (The latter was from a Bronx cab driver who admitted to smoking six cigarettes on his way to Gettler’s laboratory, lighting one with the stub of another as he went.) It was safe to assume, Gettler wrote with his usual careful precision, that “tobacco smoking appreciably increases the carbon monoxide in the blood and cannot be ignored in the interpretation of laboratory results.” THE OTHER NOTABLE poison in tobacco smoke was nicotine.”
― Deborah Blum, quote from The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York
“If you decide to just go with the flow, you'll end up where the flow goes, which is usually downhill, often leading to a big pile of sludge and a life of unhappiness. You'll end up doing what everyone else is doing.”
― Sean Covey, quote from The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective Teens
“Mandatory showers had been dropped in the fall, when Lilah Porter protested the archaic practice by staging a sit-in in the gym, where she set up a projector and played the shower scene from Carrie in a continuous loop until the school board caved.”
― Marlene Perez, quote from Dead Is the New Black
“The successful cannot be unhappy -- it was a contradiction in terms.”
― Barry Unsworth, quote from Sacred Hunger
“What are you offering now?” I asked suspiciously. “Just me, my friendship. Just me, and the now-and-then right to kiss you, hold your hand, touch your hair, and take you to the movies, and listen to your dreams because you listen to mine, and be silly once in a while, build a past we’ll enjoy rememberings—that’s all.”
― V.C. Andrews, quote from Heaven
Endless Night
Delta of Venus
The Light
The Reason for God:...
The Wandering Fire
The Happiness Hypoth...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.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
