Hugh Howey

“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.”

“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.”

“Generations of people staying close to home, there for each other, doing what they knew best, enjoying being a burden to each other.”

“That word means something else, you know,' his father had told him once, when Mission had spoken of revolution. 'It also means to go around and around. To revolve. One revolution, and you get right back to where you started.”

“....faking his real life so he can live his fake one.”

“The hard things got easier the more you did them.”

“As he entered the comm room, Troy wasn’t sure if he should laugh or cry at the realization. Then he remembered how the world was run before, and that nothing had really changed. He chuckled sadly”

“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.”

“He awoke each morning with familiar shapes at the edges of his vision, could feel memories nearby, but by the time breakfast came, they were already fading. By dinner, they were lost. It left Troy with a sadness, a cold sensation, and a feeling like a hollow stomach--different from hunger--like rainy days as a child when he didn't know how to fill his time. It was the pain of a chronic boredom mixed with the discomfort of time wasted.”

“It's not because we knew” Lukas said, sucking a gasp of air. “It's because we did it.”

“Denial is the secret sauce in this town,” he said. “It’s the flavor that holds all the other ingredients together. Here’s what I tell the newly elected: the truth is gonna get out—it always does—but it’s gonna blend in with all the lies.” The Senator twirled a hand in the air. “You have to deny each lie and every truth with the same vinegar. Let those websites and blowhards who bitch about cover-ups confuse the public for you.”

“He thought of men like Hitler, Stalin, and Napoleon. All it took was a lot of seemingly decent people to put the wrong person in power and then fall under their spell.”

“some things are better off back in the past. Where they belong.”

“We can’t tweak the genes of the food we eat without suspicion,” Erskine added. “We can pick and choose the naturally mutated ones until a blade of grass is a great ear of corn, but we can’t do it with purpose. Vic had dozens of examples like these. He rattled them off in the cafeteria that day.” Erskine ticked his fingers as he counted. “Vaccines versus natural immunities, cloning versus twins, modified foods. Or course he was perfectly right. The bastard always was. It was the manmade part that would have caused the chaos. It would be knowing that people were out to get us, that there was danger in the air we breathed.”

“Imagine the first discovery that one of these epidemics was man-made—the panic, the violence that would ensue. That’s where the end would come. A typhoon kills a few hundred people, does a few billion in damage, and what do we do?” Erskine interlocked his fingers. “We come together. We put the pieces back. But a terrorist’s bomb.” He frowned. “A terrorist’s bomb does the same damage, and it throws the world into turmoil.”He spread his hands apart like an explosion going off.“When there’s only God to blame, we forgive him. When it’s our fellow man, we must destroy him.”

“This was the mark of deep infatuation, he thought: the desire to watch a woman talk just to see her lips move, to be around her.”

“Better to go out to see the world one time with his own eyes, than to be burned alive with the plastic curtains.”

“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.”

“He had wandered with innocence and naivete into this web, and now every move would wrap him tighter. Each lie would stick to the others, until one day he would find himself in a tight little cocoon, trapped and suffocating from the thousands of little fibs that living and working in that cursed swamp of a city seemed to require every man to ooze.”

“He nearly tripped and fell down the last few steps, his legs not used to an end to the descent, a flat piece of ground rather than one more tread to sink to.”

“Happiness can come solely from within, but not for long - The Bern Seer -”

“Predict the inevitable”, she said, “and you're bound to be right one day.”

“He could imagine how nice it would be to not understand. To see one's microcosm as the macrocosm. To focus a meter beyond one's own nose.”

“My life is too tight, he wanted to say. My skin is too tight. The walls are too tight.”

“A seed of hope caught a taste of moisture. Some wishful kernel buried deep, where he was loathe to acknowledge it lest it poison or choke him, began to sprout.”

“There were certain things, learned so young and remembered so deep that they felt like little stones in the center of her mind.”

“She imagined herself at age nine, running through these very halls, crying out to her older self across the years.”

“I'm coming for you. I'm coming home, I'm coming to clean”

“What we control," Juliette said, "is our actions once fate puts us there.”

“And Lukas would tell them to be good to each other, that there were only so many of them left, and that all the books and all the stars in the universe were pointless with no one to read them, no one to peer through the parting clouds for them.”

“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.”