Joe Hill Quotes & Sayings

I told you had to be some kind of karmic opposite to the words I love you. — Joe Hill

They were in a trench sliding through a forest of corn. Machine stood over the rows, black girders that arced in the sky like the proscenium above a stage. The thought occurred to Wayne that those machines were sprayers, full of poison. They would drench the corn in a lethal rain to keep it from being eaten by invasive species. Those exact words - "invasive species" - rang through his brain. Later the corn would be lightly washed and people would eat it. — Joe Hill

Are you sure I can't have a little sniff of Oxy?" the doctor asked. He brightened. "I'd share. We could get fucked up together. — Joe Hill

Your impulse to protect me conflicts with my need to protect my self-respect. Sorry. Besides. I have this vaguely uneasy feeling you're offering to protect me from you. That's not doing me a kindness
that's coercion. — Joe Hill

Ig had always liked to listen to his father, to watch him while he played. It was almost wrong to say his father played. It often seemed the other way around: that the horn was playing him. The way his cheeks swole out, then caved in as if he were being inhaled into it, the way the golden keys seemed to grab his fingers like little magnets snatching at iron filings, causing them to leap and dance in unexpected, startling fits. The way he shut his eyes and bent his head and twisted back and forth at the hips, as if his torso were in auger, screwing its way deeper and deeper into the centre of his being, pulling the music up from somewhere in the pit of his belly. — Joe Hill

Hutter thought, not for the first time, that she hated a lot of cops. Ugly, mean drunks who believed the worst of everyone. — Joe Hill

You want sympathy, go fuck James Taylor. — Joe Hill

You don't want to start A Game of Thrones when you might catch fire all of a sudden. There's something horribly unfair about dying in the middle of a good story, before you have a chance to see how it all comes out. Of course, I suppose everyone always dies in the middle of a good story, in a sense. Your own story. Or the story of your children. Or your grandchildren. — Joe Hill

Wondering how evil had come into the world or what happens to a person after he dies: an interesting philosophical exercise, but also curiously pointless, since evil and death happened, regardless of the why and the how and the what-it-meant. — Joe Hill

The Devil knows that only those with the courage to risk their souls for love are entitled to have a soul, even if God does not. — Joe Hill

No you can't understand because you are reading the last chapter of something with out having read the first chapters. Young people always think they are coming into a story at the beginning when they are usually coming in at the end. — Joe Hill

People would believe almost any awful thing their private devil told them. — Joe Hill

The road to Christmasland is paved in dreams! — Joe Hill

He didn't finish most of the stories he started anymore, couldn't bear to. He felt weak at the thought of reading another story about vampires having sex with other vampires. He tried to struggle through Lovecraft pastiches, but at the first painfully serious reference to the Elder Gods, he felt some important part of him going numb inside, the way a foot or a hand will go to sleep when the circulation is cut off. He feared the part of him being numbed was his soul. — Joe Hill

Boy, this is your lucky day!" She clapped her hands. "You found yourself a librarian! I can help wit the figuring-out thing and point you toward some good poetry while I'm at it. It's what I do. — Joe Hill

Dignity is for people who have options. We — Joe Hill

It didn't make any logical sense for her to be worried, although Ig knew that worry and logic rarely traveled together. — Joe Hill

Workers of the world awaken. Break your chains, demand your rights.
All the wealth you make is taken, by exploiting parasites.
Shall you kneel in deep submission from your cradle to your grave?
Is the height of your ambition to be a good and willing slave? — Joe Hill

There's the real world, with all its annoying facts and rules. In the real world, there are things that are true and things that aren't. Mostly the real world s-s-s-suh-sucks. But everyone also lives in the world inside their own head. An inscape, a world of thought. In a world made of thought - in an inscape - every idea is a fact. Emotions are as real as gravity. Dreams are as powerful as history. Creative people, like writers, and Henry Rollins, spend a lot of their time hanging out in their thoughtworld. S-s-strong creatives, though, can use a knife to cut the stitches between the two worlds, can bring them together. Your bike. My tiles. Those are our knives. She — Joe Hill

I don't have custody. Wayne is just - We're on good terms about our son. It's not an issue." "Got a number where we can reach him?" "Yes, but he's on a plane right now. He visited for the Fourth. He's headed back this evening." "You sure about that? How do you know he boarded the plane?" "I'm sure he had nothing to do with this, if that's what you're asking. We're not fighting over our son. My ex is the most harmless and easygoing man you've ever met." "Oh, I don't know. I've met some pretty easygoing fellas. I know a guy up in Maine who leads a Buddhist-themed therapy group, teaches people about managing their temper and addictions through Transcendental Meditation. The only time this guy ever lost his composure was the day his wife served him with a restraining order. First he lost his Zen, then he lost two bullets in the back of her head. But that Buddhist-themed therapy group he runs sure is popular on his cell block in Shawshank. Lotta guys with anger-management issues in there. — Joe Hill

The snowmen stood in bunches, in families, and the breeze generated by the car snatched at their striped scarves. Snowmen fathers and snowgirl mothers with their snowchildren and snowpuppies. Top hats were in abundance, as were corncob pipes and carrot noses. They waved the crooked sticks of their arms, saluting Mr. Manx, Wayne, and NOS4A2 as they went by. The black coals of their eyes gleamed, darker than the night, brighter than the stars. — Joe Hill

I don't know, maybe you'd be more interested in me if I were a book. — Joe Hill

Men, she thought, were one of the world's few sure comforts, like a fire on a cold October night, like cocoa, like broken-in-slippers. Their clumsy affections, their bristly faces, and their willingness to do what needed to be done - cook an omelette, change lightbulbs, make with hugging - sometimes almost made being a woman fun. — Joe Hill

Ma'am," Cline said, "I hid under dead bodies less cold than you." He glanced at Harper and — Joe Hill

I liked AC/DC," Lee said. "If you were going to shoot someone, you'd really want to do it while you were listening to them."
"What about the Beatles? Did you feel like shooting anyone listening to them?"
Lee considered seriously for a moment, then said, "Myself."
At the same time he was laughing, Ig was distressed. Not liking the Beatles was almost as bad as not knowing about them at all. — Joe Hill

Women offer a different sort of salvation, more immediate and fulfilling. They don't put off their love for a distant, ill-defined eternity but make a gift of it in the here and now. — Joe Hill

He thought how the young are pierced by love, innocent bodies torn and ruined for no reason, save that it suited someone who held them dear. — Joe Hill

Why am I not good at anything?"
"You're a good dad."
"It ain't rocket science."
No, Vic thought. It was harder. — Joe Hill

Bing was sitting in front of the TV with the de Zoets an hour later when Mr. Manx came out, fully dressed, in his silk shirt and tails and narrow-toed boots. His starved, cadaverous face had an unhealthy sheen to it in the flickering blue shadows. — Joe Hill

She came back from the eighties to save mankind. Martha Quinn is our only hope. — Joe Hill

was once a young lady from Yale,'" said the Gasmask Man. "'Who had verses tattooed on her tail. And on her behind, for the sake of the blind, a duplicate version in braille. — Joe Hill

In a lot of ways, I guess Satan was the first superhero." "Don't you mean supervillain?" "Nah. Hero, for sure. Think about it. In his first adventure, he took the form of a snake to free two prisoners being held naked in a Third World jungle prison by an all-powerful megalomaniac. At the same time, he broadened their diet and introduced them to their own sexuality. Sounds kind of like a cross between Animal Man and Dr. Phil to me." She — Joe Hill

The best time to see her is when the place is almost full. — Joe Hill

every fictional world was a work of fantasy, and whenever writers introduce a threat or a conflict into their story, they create the possibility of horror. He had been drawn to horror fiction, he said, because it took the most basic elements of literature and pushed them to their extremes. All fiction was make-believe, which made fantasy more valid (and honest) than realism. He — Joe Hill

He would think God was a dyke librarian, and he would know the fear of her. — Joe Hill

That is the most wonderful sentence I have ever heard. I want that on my gravestone. Snuffleupagus was real. No more. Just that. Harper — Joe Hill

It seemed to her sometimes that this was the only fight that mattered: the struggle to take the world's chaos and make it mean something, to put it to words. — Joe Hill

There was an intensity of sensation when you were on the edge of what you could handle, when you were physically tested and made to fight for each breath, that was somehow exhilarating. — Joe Hill

FOX said the Dragon had been set loose by ISIS, using spores that had been invented by the Russians in the 1980s. MSNBC said sources indicated the 'scale might've been created by engineers at Halliburton and stolen by culty Christian types fixated on the Book of Revelation. CNN reported both sides. — Joe Hill

She felt the English were themselves to blame for her feelings. They had spent a century relentlessly marketing their detectives and wizards and nannies, and they had to live with the results. Her — Joe Hill

Terry is sure that Ig has never even kissed another girl, let alone fucked one, and he has wished for a while now that Iggy had more experience. Not because Terry didn't want his brother to be with Merrin, but because ... well, because. Because love requires context. Because first relationships are by their very nature immature. So Merrin wanted them both to have a chance to grow up. So what? — Joe Hill

That's what I mean. I thought it was only in filthy places no one wants to go, like Chernobyl and Detroit. — Joe Hill

When you think about it, most of the good ideas came along to make sin a whole lot easier. — Joe Hill

If you can dream a thing, then it has a kind of reality in your thoughts.
And if you dream hard enough, and have the right vehicle - a vehicle that you really love, a part of yourself - you can slip right out of reality and into that other, better, imaginary world, where the only reality is the one you allow. — Joe Hill

She associated English accents with singing teapots, schools for witchcraft, and the science of deduction. This wasn't, she knew, terribly sophisticated of her, but she had no real guilt about it. She felt the English were themselves to blame for her feelings. They had spent a century relentlessly marketing their detectives and wizards and nannies, and they had to live with the results. — Joe Hill

With the cross around his neck he could be his old self again, he could have it all back if he wanted it, but it wasn't worth having. If you were going to live in hell on earth, there was something to be said for being one of the devils. - Horns p.381 — Joe Hill

The blood of a redheaded woman is three degrees cooler than the blood of a normal woman. This has been established by medical studies. — Joe Hill

The night had a nearly liquid quality, was like sliding into a warm swimming pool, a pool filled with buoyant darkenss instead of water. — Joe Hill

She was half talking to herself or, maybe more accurately, talking with her own private devil, a demon that just also happened to have Ig Perrish's face. — Joe Hill

The pills I take are a paperweight. All they do is pin the fantasies down. But they're still there, and any strong wind that comes along, I can feel them rattling around, trying to slip free. — Joe Hill

I felt like it needed some color down there, so I painted the walls with the motherfucker. — Joe Hill

Pick a sin we can both live with, is what I ask. — Joe Hill

The fires of hell are not hot enough for a man - or woman! - who would hurt his children. — Joe Hill

Finish the book. Finish the book, regardless of how bad it is. You can make it better in a rewrite. — Joe Hill

The Devil and woman have been allies against God from the beginning, ever since Satan first came to the first man in the form of a snake and whispered to Adam that true happiness was not to be found in prayer but in Eve's cunt. — Joe Hill

I'm not questioning your bravery. I'm questioning your intelligence. — Joe Hill

Oh, man, I'm no good at lying. Mom always knows. She knows the second I open my mouth." Terence looked relieved. "So who said open your mouth? You're in pain. Just stand there and cry. Leave the bullshit to me. It's what I'm good at. — Joe Hill

It was perhaps, the devil's oldest precept, that sin could always be trusted to reveal what was most human in a person as often for good as for ill. — Joe Hill

Then Glenn Beck burned to death on his Internet program, right in front of his chalkboard, burned so hot his glasses fused to his face, and after that most of the news was less about who did it and more about how not to catch it. — Joe Hill

He had been a demon for just two days, but the time when he knew what it was like to be loved seemed to exist in a hazily recalled past, to have been left behind long ago. — Joe Hill

Wayne didn't interact with nature. He took pictures of it with his iPhone and then bent over the screen and poked at it. His favorite thing about the lake house was that it had Wi-Fi. — Joe Hill

It's awfully good of some people to have asked me to take the job, but I'd rather read about a grand escape than plan one. Besides, I'm terrible at keeping secrets and I hate to scheme against people. It seems rude. I don't deal with guilt well and I'm worried we might hurt some feelings in the process of defending ourselves. Also, I am juggling a couple of books. Being a full-time conspirator would take away from my reading time. — Joe Hill

It's because she doesn't love being lonely. When a girl loses her virginity, though, it may hurt, but it's real. It might be the realest, most private thing you could ever see in another person. You wonder who she'll be in that moment, when you finally get past all the pretend. — Joe Hill

Everything that is good in the day is even better in the night. A merry-go-round, a ferris wheel, a kiss from a girl. — Joe Hill

All the world is made of music. We are all strings on a lyre. We resonate. We sing together. — Joe Hill

Mostly, though, he looked at the girl, with her red hair and bare white arms. There was something about the whiteness of those arms that made them seem more naked than the bare arms of other women in church. A lot of red heads had freckles, but she looked as if she had been carved from a block of soap ... She was very pretty, about his age, her hair braided into a silky rope the colour of black cherries. She was fingering a delicate gold cross around her throat, and she turned it just so, into the sunlight, and it shone, became a cruciform flame. She lingered on the gesture, making it a kind of confession, then turned the cross away. — Joe Hill

A flock isn't such a bad thing if you belong, but a few hundred starlings will tear an unlucky martin to feathers if it crosses their path. — Joe Hill

He paused, twisting his goatee, considering the law in Deuteronomy that forbade clothes with mixed fibers. A problematic bit of Scripture. A matter that required thought. "Only the devil wants man to have a wide range of lightweight and comfortable styles to choose from," he murmured at last, trying out a new proverb. "Although there may be no forgiveness for polyester. On this one matter, Satan and the Lord are in agreement. — Joe Hill

He looked cold in his little loincloth, so Bing flicked a match and dressed him in a robe of flame — Joe Hill

Social media is teaching us that everyone fucks up, everyone is stupid sometimes, and that this is probably part of being a thinking human. The one exception are those who participate in the self-righteousness Olympics and they often turn people who agree with them against 'em. — Joe Hill

The mad sometimes drilled holes in their own heads to let the demons out. To relieve the pressure of thoughts they could no longer bear. Jude understood the impulse. Each beat of his heart was a fresh and staggering blow felt in the nerves behind his eyes and in his temples. Punishing evidence of life. — Joe Hill

This is the way people dream of being kissed, a movie star kiss — Joe Hill

I hope if there is another world, we will not be judged too harshly for the things we did wrong here - that we will at least be forgiven for the mistakes we made out of love. — Joe Hill

As a world of shared ideas, Twitter is a kind of Inscape in and of itself, and a good one. — Joe Hill

Outlaws like to sleep in. I've been FBI for eight years, and I've never once had cause to shoot anyone before eleven in the morning. Not as long as I get my coffee anyway. — Joe Hill

He understood that the ghost existed first and foremost within his own head. That maybe ghosts always haunted minds, not places. — Joe Hill

There was no such thing as arguing with delight. Like seeing a pretty girl with the sunlight in her hair, like pancakes and hot chocolate in front of a crackling fire. Delight was one of the fundamental forces of being, like gravity. — Joe Hill

A little north of Boston, there was something called LOVECRAFT KEYHOLE; it was a crater in the rough shape of a padlock. — Joe Hill

The aspiring novelist in me wants a secret tunnel hidden behind a false wall, or a poster of a famous movie star, or — Joe Hill

Poor kids often dressed up. It was rich kids who dressed down, carefully assembling a blue-collar costume: eighty-dollar designer jeans that had been professionally faded and tattered and worn-out — Joe Hill

I want you to remember what was good in me, not what was most awful. The people you love should be allowed to keep their worst to themselves. — Joe Hill

Her face was framed by two wings of lank black hair that curled under her long, pointed chin, so she looked like the female version of the wizard who was always giving Harry Potter such a hard time in the movies. Professor Snail or something. — Joe Hill

Do you like eighties music, Nurse Willowes?" "Can we discuss the oldies another time?" "What? What? The oldies? I've already had a man kicking in my ribs, and now you pull out my heart." "Hey! — Joe Hill

I put the Fifth of November and the Fourth of July to shame. Who needs Roman candles when you've got me? — Joe Hill

Yeah. Ideally I'd like to see us leave a swath of destruction that can be seen from orbit. Barring that, let's at least try to destroy something precious and beautiful that can never be replaced, — Joe Hill

Humanity is worse than flies. — Joe Hill

Basically, it comes down do this: You can live life as a cripple or a coward. What happens now is up to you. — Joe Hill

Above it all drifted a silvery scythe blade of moon. Wayne looked up at it, and away, and then looked again. The moon had a hooked nose, a thoughtfully frowning mouth, and a single eye closed in sleep. When it exhaled, a wind rippled across the plains and silvery beds of cloud raced through the night. Wayne almost clapped his hands in delight to look upon it. — Joe Hill

The girl worked the clutch and the gas and the brake expertly with her right foot, just as her father had taught her. — Joe Hill

He felt that when his little men were painted well, they possessed a tension, a suggestion that they might, at any moment, begin to move on their own and charge the French line. — Joe Hill

I feel bad for her. It's not a lot of fun, you know."
"What?"
"Being in love with you. I've been with a lot of bad guys who made me feel lousy about myself, Jude, but you're something special. Because I knew none of them really cared about me, but you do, and you make me feel like your shitty hooker anyway. — Joe Hill

books were girls, and reading was s-ss-ssss - fucking, this would be the biggest whorehouse in the county and I'd be the most ruthless pimp you ever met. — Joe Hill

You just missed a perfectly good opportunity to toast an awful Coldplay T-shirt. If I ever spontaneously combust, I hope I'm holding a whole stack of their CDs. Harper — Joe Hill

He had won it as a child, playing Scriptural Jeopardy in his Sunday-school class. When faced with answers from the Bible, Ig had all the right questions. — Joe Hill

Jude collected them in almost exactly the same way the Pied Piper had collected rats, and children. He made melodies out of hate and perversion and pain, and they came to him, skipping to the music, hoping he would let them sing along. — Joe Hill

If you didn't have me to rake you over the coals now and then, there wouldn't be any fire in your life at all. — Joe Hill

It was a curious quirk of Harper's nature that she grew calmer in the moments when others were most inclined to sink into hysterics; that she was habitually at her most observant and clear-eyed in the very times when others could not bear to see what was happening at all. She would've made a fine battlefield nurse. She — Joe Hill

A thin gold chain glittered at his throat. — Joe Hill

They glowed in the darkness, all of them: pale shining wisps with rings of light where their eyes belonged, as if they were the dead - ghosts risen from their graves - not Gilbert Cline. Harper felt their grief as a slow current of cold water, and herself as a leaf revolving upon it. As — Joe Hill

Her sanity was a fragile thing, a butterfly cupped in her hands, that she carried with her everywhere, afraid of what would happen if she let it go - or got careless and crushed it. — Joe Hill