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

About the author

Popular quotes

“Close your eyes, Maxon.
"What?"
"Close your eyes.
Somewhere in this palace, there is a woman who will be your wife. This girl? imagine that she depends on you. She needs you to cherish her and make her feel like the Selection didn't even happen. Like if you were dropped in your own out in the middle of the country to wander around door to door, she's still the one you would have found. She was always the one you would have picked. She needs you to provide for her and protect her. And if it came to a point where there was absolutely nothing to eat, and you couldn't even fall asleep at night because the sound of her stomach growling kept you awake—"
"Stop it!"
"Sorry."
"Is that really what it's like? Out there... does that happen? Are people hungry like that a lot?"
"Maxon, I..."
"Tell me the truth."
"Yes. That happens. I know of families where people give up their share for their children or siblings. I know of a boy who was whipped in the town square for stealing food. Sometimes you do crazy things when you are desperate."
"A boy? How old?"
"Nine."
"Have you ever been like that? Starving?
...How bad?"
"Maxon, it will only upset you more."
"Probably, but I'm only starting to realize how much I don't know about my own country. Please."
"We've been pretty bad. Most time if it gets to where we have to choose, we keep the food and lose electricity. The worst was when it happened near Christmas one year. May didn't understand why we couldn't exchange gifts. As a general rule, there are never any leftovers at my house. Someone always wants more. I know the checks we've gotten over the last few weeks have really helped, and my family is really smart about money. I'm sure they have already tucked it away so it will stretch out for a long time. You've done so much for us, Maxon."
"Good God. When you said that you were only here for the food, you weren't kidding, were you?"
"Really, Maxon, we've been doing pretty well lately. I—"
"I'll see you at dinner.”
― Kiera Cass, quote from The Selection

“I know all about you," Char announced after we'd taken a few more steps. "You do? How could you?" "Your cook and our cook meet at the market. She talks about you." He looked sideways at me. "Do you know much about me?”
― Gail Carson Levine, quote from Ella Enchanted

“Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.”
― William Faulkner, quote from The Sound and the Fury

“A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, quote from Man's Search for Meaning

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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.

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