Hugh Howey

These five links stand out in the chain that binds our will. They hold us, guide us, coerce us — And we rattle them still. ~The Bern Seer~

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

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.

It was one long emo-ish rant of false badassery.

Her mother, buried. A town, lost. A small group of men, somewhere out there, cheering.

I’m here because they haven’t made a computer yet that won’t do something stupid one time out of a hundred trillion. Seems like good odds, but when computers are doing trillions of things a day, that means a whole lot of stupid.

I’m sorry.” Two words that I used to choke on when I was younger, that I only now know the value of, the true worth, and how good they feel to say.

I call this the Relativistic Weekend Effect. We live in the present, but our happiness relies heavily on the future. Our mood is as much expectation as experience.

No life had ever been truly saved, not in the history of mankind. They were merely prolonged. Everything comes to an end.

The law is the law. You broke it. You knew you were breaking it.

We tend to discover only those things we seek.

Yesterday’s misery had become nostalgic fondness.

There was no going around it, so we tried to race back to the inlet, but the storm was moving too fast. Winds over fifty miles an hour. It hit us all at once like a heavenly fist, a mighty slam of stinging rain and raucous seas.

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.

Statistics were magic like this: they could tell you with near-certainty that a thing would occur, without a hint of when or where.