Peace in Amber Quotes

“I used to make fists and hit walls, but it hurt me more than it hurt them. The people who did bad things to me, they didn't care how angry I got. It didn't fix a thing.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“And so things go unchanged and unaccepted, and our arms and heart grow weary.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“Montana wants to scream, but the thing she is angry at is in the past. The past can’t hear her. This is the thing, her great discovery. She smiles at the future. Happiness is a choice.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“I am about to die. It is September 11, and every cell in my body is acutely aware of my looming demise. The certainty of it. The inevitability. Not years from now, not weeks nor days. Moments.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“I glance at my wristwatch. It has gotten so late that it is now September 11, and there I am standing in a patch of blue and empty sky.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“Montana Wildhack is screaming. All of us are. Twelve years later, I’m lying beside my dog in an otherwise empty house. She dreams and I cry. Thousands are dying all over again. So it goes.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“I’m reading a book about bombs being dropped on Dresden. Twenty-five thousand people are dying. There’s a plane banking over Manhattan right now. I can read the jumble of numbers and letters on the tail of that plane. I am screaming in my head for the pilot to pull up.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“the fires are not urgent. They move at a crawl, and the gray smoke drifts lazily into the cloudless sky, and I can’t imagine that anyone is hurt. They will get away. They will get away. There are sirens coming, and this is just some thing to gawk at.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“Bad things happen, and shoulders are shrugged. The most serious of events are blended with the strange. The author pulled me inside his mind, and what I found there was a dead stillness, the somber and poignant wisdom of someone with little hope and scars across his eyes. There was humor there, too. But not the bright kind. The man who wrote that book is dead. So it goes.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“We devolve into animals when we creep near to death.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“She is on the planet Tralfamadore, billions of light years from Earth, but she feels right at home in this stranger’s arms. The way a mosquito feels at peace in amber.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“But this is where we're different. You can see the future and refuse to change it. Where I come from, we can see the past, but we keep repeating it. That's why we're different. The same but different.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“Like Montana Wildhack, Scott dances for a living. But it's called ballet and wardrobe is involved, so somewhow it's more acceptable.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“Billy Pilgrim wasn't weak, she decided, as he drifted back to sleep—he was broken. The whole system was broken. Sending young men to war, expecting them to come back whole, their bullets to make things right. Expecting a girl from the Big Sky State to step off a bus in LA and have a career that wouldn't kill her. The machinery of it all was set up unfair from the start. Living in three dimensions meant you learned what you needed to know too late in life.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“But this is where we’re different. You see the future and refuse to change it. Where I come from, we can see the past, but we keep repeating it.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“there is a man blocking our way. Sitting astride a tractor with a big scooping bucket on the front, he yells at us for being on his property. We explain the boats, and he says we can’t tie up there, that this is his restaurant. We say there’s no room anywhere, that the Coast Guard won’t let us leave, that they’ll shoot at us if we do. He tells us we better go fucking home and get our guns. He tells us we’re at war.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“It is September 11, 2013. Twelve years have gone by. I’m on a flight from San Francisco to Ft. Lauderdale, a cross-country flight loaded down with fuel.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“There is much to do, pulling people away, right up until the Coast Guard comes and orders us to stop. Scott is dead. My cell phone is dead. My mother must think me dead. So it goes. I pick up the papers that have drifted down on the boat and have become plastered there, these relics from great buildings that no longer stand. The first one I grab is an insurance document. Listen: What I tell you here is true. The first line on the first page I pick up, it begins: In the event of damage to the building… So it goes.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“A man asks if I’m leaving. People can hear the engines, can see the exhaust, are watching me scramble around the decks to make ready. “C’mon,” I tell the man. Others are looking at me expectantly. “Anyone who wants to go, c’mon,” I say. I have people to help. Somehow, this helps me.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“The second jet, however, brought the promise of a third and a fourth. Here was a pattern. Jets are falling out of the sky. The world has gone amuck. A GPS malfunction, an EMP detonation, solar flares, a dozen disaster films, and science fiction plots. My brain is misfiring with all the possibilities but the real one.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“the boom. I hear it and I feel it.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“After a pause, Andrew says that these buildings will always be here, that they will outlive us all. And I believe him. “But just imagine,” my mammal brain says, “if you took this one we’re standing in down in such a way that it toppled into that guy.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“It’s the part of me that makes me contemplate a fall when confronted with an abyss or some great height.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“Imagine this coming down,” I say out loud. I believe it’s the mammal in me that has this thought, the mammal that can remember living in trees.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“September 10, 2001. A storm is brewing in New York City. A clash is about to begin. Tempers will soon rise as historical conquests and slights are remembered and renewed on the eve of this fight between ancient and embittered foes. Yes, the Boston Red Sox are playing the New York Yankees.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“men wrestle with the things they cannot change, and they ignore those that might bend to some economy of effort.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“he wrote of these things and utter nonsense in the same breath, and this made me dismiss the book. Until I finished it. You have to see all things at once, as on Tralfamadore. I read it again. I caught a glimpse of some other dimension.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“There was a crash. Ceiling panels rained down, lights exploding. They had run from the building, had run through the courtyard, and there were bodies— There were bodies everywhere.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“The first sign that something is wrong is Andrew’s wife running to us, shaking and crying.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber

“the absurdity of a smoking skyscraper.”
― Hugh Howey, Peace in Amber