Joe Hill Quotes

Death isn't the end of your life, you know. Your body is a lock. Death is the key. The key turns... and you're free. To be anywhere. Everywhere. Two places at once. Nowhere. Part of the background hum of the universe.
Joe Hill
Wouldn’t be very fair to the rest of them, would it?” Harper asked. “They’re not bad people, most of them. All they want is to be safe.”“Isn’t that always a permission slip for ugliness and cruelty? All they want is to be safe, and they don’t care who they have to destroy to stay that way. And the people who want to kill us, the Cremation Crews, all they want is safety, too!
Joe Hill
If 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. Whap the girls on the butts and send them off to their tricks as fast and often as I can.
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
Carol says we speak with one voice. What she doesn't say is that voice belongs to HER. There's only one song to sing these days--Carol's song--and if you aren't in harmony, you can stick a stone in your mouth and shut the hell up.
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
Taking a thing apart is always faster than putting something together. This is true of everything except marriage.
Joe Hill
One thing I realize now is that you only advertise your beliefs with a t-shirt if you're seriously insecure.
Joe Hill
To be honest, I think cell phones were invented by the devil.
Joe Hill
There's only room for one hero in this story-and everyone knows the devil doesn't get to be the good guy.
Joe Hill
He had tried to explain the way he felt to Danny once, about compulsive behavior and time rushing too fast and the Internet and drugs. Danny had only lifted one of his slender, mobile eyebrows and stared at him in smirking confusion. Danny did not think coke and computers were anything alike. But Jude had seen the way people hunched over their screens, clicking the refresh button again and again, waiting for some crucial if meaningless hit of information, and he thought it was almost exactly the same.
Joe Hill
Gold don't come off. What's good stays good no matter how much of a beating it takes.
Joe Hill
Sillman looked at his interrogator with hopeless eyes. 'I think while I was passed out, I dreamed about my mom's gingerbread cookies. Maybe the guy who knocked on the glass was eatin' one.' 'Mm,' said Peace-not-War. 'Well. That's helpful. We'll put an APB out on the Gingerbread Man. I'm not hopeful it'll do us much good, though. Word on the street is you can't catch him.
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
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
I think if you cheat in a ethics class then there's really no hope for you.
Joe Hill
Max raised the mallet. He stared into her face and wished he could say he was sorry, that he didn't want to do it. When he slammed the mallet down, with an echoing bang, he heard a high, piercing scream and almost screamed himself, believing for an instant it was her, still somehow alive; then realized it was Rudy. Max was powerfully built, with his, deep water-buffalo chest and Dutch farmer's shoulders. With the first blow he had driven the stake over two-thirds of the way in. He only needed to bring the mallet down once more. The blood that squelched up around the wood was cold and had a sticky, viscous consistency.Max swayed, his head light. His father took his arm.'Goot,' Abraham whispered into his ear, his arms around him, squeezing him so tightly his ribs creaked. Max felt a little thrill of pleasure - an automatic reaction to the intense, unmistakable affection of his father's embrace - and was sickened by it. 'To do offense to the house of the human spirit, even after its tenant depart, is no easy thing, I know.'("Abraham's Boys")
Joe Hill
You loved me as hard as you knew how. I'd give anything to go back and love you better...
Joe Hill
Someone probably a lot smarter than me said hell is other people. I say you're in hell when you don't give to someone who needs, because you can't bear to have less.
Joe Hill
I think you must make a few [mistakes]. Of you don't, you're probably thinking too much. That's the worst mistake you can make.
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
He'd possessed all the key elements of a school shooter: hormones, misery, ammunition. People wondered how something like Columbine could happen. Jude wondered why it didn't happen more often.
Joe Hill
Already, though, she understood the difference between being a child and being an adult. The difference is when someone says he can keep the bad things away, a child believes him.
Joe Hill
The difference between childhood and adulthood, Vic had come to believe, was the difference between imagination and resignation. You traded one for the other and lost your way.
Joe Hill
Does your license plate mean something?" Bing asked. "En-o-ess-four-a-two?""Nosferatu," the man Charlie Manx said."Nosfer-what-who?"Manx said, "It is one of my little jokes. My first wife once accused me of being a Nosferatu. She did not use that exact word, but close enough.
Joe Hill
I'm sorry to bother you," she whispered. "When I get excited about a movie I want to talk. I can't help it.
Joe Hill
Because, of course, it wouldn't do to just talk to her. She had spoken to him in flashes of daylight, and he felt he ought to reply in kind.
Joe Hill
Kids always think they're coming into a story at the beginning, when usually they're coming in at the end.
Joe Hill
Pick a sin we can both live with, is what I ask.
Joe Hill
...but God fears woman even more than He fears the devil -and is right to. She, with her power to bring life into the world, was truly made in the image of the Creator, not man...
Joe Hill
Death and ruin is man's preferred ecosystem.
Joe Hill
It's like in the Bible.You can't always get what you want, but if you really need something, you usually find it.""What part of the Bible is that from?" Ig asked her. "The Gospel of Keith Richards?
Joe Hill
A thousand prayers every minute everywhere and what does God ever say back? Nothing! Because silence never lies. Silence is God's final advantage. Silence is the purest form of harmony. Everyone ought to try it.
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
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
Sometimes it seemed that one of the stars came loose from the firmament and sailed off with dizzying speed to a far corner of the night. In the dark hours before sunrise, constellations came apart and reformed and fell in burning streaks.
Joe Hill
She had felt good for a few moments, racing across the face of the hill on her old bike, but the happy feeling had burned itself out and left behind a thin, cold rage. She was no longer entirely sure who she was angry with though. Her anger didn't have a fixed point. It was a soft whir of emotion to match the soft whir of the spokes.
Joe Hill
I wanted to explore this idea that the bogey man in the closet is scary, but being a mother is scarier.
Joe Hill
Carroll was eleven years old when he saw The Haunting in The Oregon Theater. He had gone with his cousins, but when the lights went down, his companions were swallowed by the dark and Carroll found himself essentially alone, shut tight into his own suffocating cabinet of shadows. At times, it required all his will not to hide his eyes, yet his insides churned with a nervous-sick frisson of pleasure. When the lights finally came up, his nerve endings were ringing, as if he had for a moment grabbed a copper wire with live current in it. It was a sensation for which he had developed a compulsion.Later, when he was a professional and it was his business, his feelings were more muted - not gone, but experienced distantly, more like the memory of an emotion than the thing itself. More recently, even the memory had fled, and in its place was a deadening amnesia, a numb disinterest when he looked at the piles of magazines on his coffee table. Or no - he was overcome with dread, but the wrong kind of dread.("Best New Horror")
Joe Hill
He got up and ran on, pitching himself down the hill, flying through the branches of the firs, leaping roots and rocks without seeing them. As he went, the hill got steeper and steeper, until it was really like falling. He was going too fast and he knew when he came to a stop, it would involve crashing into something, and shattering pain.Only as he went on, picking up speed all the time, until with each leap he seemed to sail through yards of darkness, he felt a giddy surge of emotion, a sensation that might have been panic but felt strangely like exhilaration. He felt as if at any moment his feet might leave the ground and never come back down. He knew this forest, this darkness, this night. He knew his chances: not good. He knew what was after him. It had been after him all his life. He knew where he was - in a story about to unfold an ending. He knew better than anyone how these stories went, and if anyone could find their way out of these woods, it was him.("Best New Horror")
Joe Hill
He believed in his own decency with all his heart. So it was with every true monster, Vic supposed.
Joe Hill
The dead pull the living down.
Joe Hill
Terror is the desire to save your own ass, but horror is rooted in sympathy.
Joe Hill
Horror was rooted in sympathy . . . in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst.
Joe Hill
Everything that is good in the day is even better in the night.
Joe Hill
Why is there evil in the world? Because sometimes you just wanna fuckin have it, and you don’t care who gets hurt.
Joe Hill
Writers were as parasitic, she supposed, as the spore itself.
Joe Hill
For a time he read his Neil Diamond bible by the firelight. He paused, twisting nervously at 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 matter, Satan and the Lord are in agreement.
Joe Hill
The sound of an English accent distracted her and lifted her spirits. 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
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
... people made the imaginary real all the time: taking the music they heard in their head and recording it, seeing a house in their imagination and building it. Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.
Joe Hill
The imagination is our final advantage as a species, a place to safely (and happily) explore experiences that are far from safe and far from happy. “Dracula” and “The Fly” may delight and appall in equal measure, but they also gently prepare us, helping us to think about how we would respond if faced with a terrifying seduction, or a corrupted and infected body.
Joe Hill
I wouldn't underrate the power of regret. It doesn't feel good... But it's hard to learn anything important without it.
Joe Hill
It’d be a mistake,” Lee said. “I think maybe you have to make a few,” Merrin said. “If you don’t, you’re probably thinking too much. That’s the worst mistake you can make.
Joe Hill
In any random slaughter, the difference between living and dying rarely has anything to do with willpower, or wisdom, or pluck. It's just a matter of where you're standing. Two inches to the right, and the bus hits you. If your office is on the ninety-second floor instead of the ninetieth, you don't make it out in time.
Joe Hill
Vic didn't have a car and probably spent a hundred and sixty hours a week at home. The house smelled of piss-soaked diapers and engine parts, and the sink was always full.In retrospect Vic was only surprised she didn't go crazy sooner. She was surprised that more young mothers didn't lose it. When your tits had become canteens and the soundtrack to your life was hysterical tears and mad laughter, how could anyone expect you to remain sane?
Joe Hill
Don't ever have children, Tyler, unless you're ready to be afraid everyday for the rest of your life.
Joe Hill
I mean, when the world comes for your children, with the knives out, it's your job to stand in the way.
Joe Hill
But it turned out life was more like the kind of song the Stones wrote: you didn't get any satisfaction, you took one hit to the body after another, if you were a woman you were a bitch who belonged under someone's thumb, and if you wanted mother's little helper from your dear doctor you better have the silver, take it or leave it, and don't come crying for sympathy, that was just for the devil.
Joe Hill
The people in charge can always justify doing terrible things in the name of the greater good. A slaughter here, a little torture there. It becomes moral to do things that would be immoral if an ordinary individual did ’em.
Joe Hill