Quotes from Wool Omnibus Edition

“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 Edition

“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 Edition

“Even in the darkness, his smile threw shadows.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus Edition

“Better to join a ghost than to be haunted by them. Better no life than an empty one-”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus Edition

“Her life was not yet over, she decided. It just felt this way.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus Edition

“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 Edition

“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 Edition

“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 Edition

“It was a sad loss, this illusion of importance, a humbling blow.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus Edition

“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 Edition

“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 Edition

“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 Edition

“Wisely and slowly; they stumble that run fast.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus Edition

“If the lies don't kill you, the truth will.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus Edition

“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 Edition

“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 Edition

“He continued to see inevitable events from the past as avoidable, long after they'd taken their course.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus Edition

“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 Edition

“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 Edition

“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 Edition

“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 Edition

“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 Edition

“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 Edition

“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 Edition

“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 Edition

“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 Edition

“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 Edition

“Juliette felt a wash of fear and relief, those two opposites twisting together like staircase and rail.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Wool Omnibus Edition

“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 Edition

“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 Edition

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Popular quotes

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“I know what it's like to lose kits, Oakheart, I wouldn't wish that kind of grief on any cat.”
― Erin Hunter, quote from Forest of Secrets

“Celeste was practically talking to herself now because Stamford and the baby were in a world of their own. The baby's hands had reached the man's face and he was tapping every feature of it, doing everything that was necessary for the man to say the words the baby had come to expect in their brief history together. Stamford's mouth opened more and more. 'You here early this mornin,' Stamford Crow Blueberry would say to Ellwood Freemen that day some twenty years later in Richmond. Ellwood would be walking up the street with the reins of his horse in his hand, and Stamford would be walking with a baby resting on his shoulder, the newest member of the Richmond Home for Colored Orphans. Mother and father killed in a fire. Walking and singing to the baby in the morning seemed to calm the infant for the rest of the day. Ellwood Freemen would say, 'I have come to fulfill my duty, just as I promised, Mr. Blueberry. Is that to be one of my pupils?' Stamford would shake his hand, nodding. Ellwood said, 'You look as if you didn't believe I would keep my word.' 'Oh,' Stamford said, 'I whatn't worried. I know where your mama and papa live. I know where I could find them to tell em that their boy didn't keep his word.' Ellwood told him he had to tend to some business elsewhere in Richmond and would return shortly to settle in at the home for orphans. He got on his horse and rode slowly out to the main street, the street that would be named for Stamford Blueberry and his wife Delphie. Blueberry, with the new orphan on his shoulder, followed. He watched Ellwood take his time going off and Stamford that day would realize for the first time just how far they had come. He would have cried as he had that day after the ground opened up and took the dead crows, but he had in his arms a baby new to being an orphan. Stamford, it don't matter now, he told himself, watching Ellwood and the horse saunter away. It don't matter now. The day and the sun all about him told that was true. It mattered not how long he had wandered in the wilderness, how long they had kept him in chains, how long he had helped them and kept himself in his own chains; none of that mattered now. He patted the baby's back, turned around and went back to the Richmond Home for Colored Orphans. No, it did not matter. It mattered only that those kind of chains were gone and that he had crawled out into the clearing and was able to stand up on his hind legs and look around and appreciate the differences between then and now, even on the awful Richmond days when the now came dressed as the then. Behind him, as he walked back, was the very corner where more than a hundred years later they would put that first street sign - Stamford and Delphie Crow Blueberry Street.”
― Edward P. Jones, quote from The Known World

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About BookQuoters

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.