Wool Omnibus Quotes

“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, Wool Omnibus

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

“It turned out that some crooked things looked even worse when straightened. Some tangled knots only made sense once unraveled.”
― Hugh Howey, 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, Wool Omnibus

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

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

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

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

“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, Wool Omnibus

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

“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, 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, Wool

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

“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, Wool Omnibus

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

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

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

“He was a good man, but he had a broken heart. That’ll take even the best of them down.”
― Hugh Howey, Wool

“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, 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, 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, Wool

“No good coming from the truth? Knowing the truth is always good. And better that it’s us discovering it than someone else, right?”
― Hugh Howey, Wool

“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, Wool

“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, 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, Wool Omnibus

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