Joe Hill Quotes

God saves - but not now, and not here. His salvation is on layaway. Like all grifters, He asks you to pay now and take it on faith that you will receive later. Whereas 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, frequently to those who deserve it least. So it was in my case. So it is for many. The devil and woman have been allies against God from the beginning...

~ Joe Hill

The Incas were right to worship the sun, Father. God is fire. Combustion is the one inarguable blessing. A tree, oil, coal, a man, a civilization, a soul. They've all got to burn sometime. The warmth made by their passing may be the salvation of others. The ultimate value of the Bible, the Constitution, or any work of literature, really, is that they all burn very well, and for a while they keep back the cold.

~ Joe Hill

I am, I was. I want to be.

~ Joe Hill

You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know.

~ Joe Hill

She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.

~ Joe Hill

Fear does not incline people to be moderate in their use of extreme tactics.

~ Joe Hill

Everyone lives in two worlds,” Maggie said, speaking in an absentminded sort of way while she studied her letters. “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.

~ Joe Hill

[Lou]: “I’m not talking about the angioplasty. I mean the stuff you’re pumping into me. What is it? Something serious?”[Nurse]: “Oh. This is nothing. You’re not going under the knife today, so you don’t get the good shit. This is a blood-thinning agent. Also, it’ll mellow you out. Got to keep the mellows going.”[Lou]: “It’ll put me to sleep?”[Nurse]: “Faster than a marathon of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.

~ Joe Hill

I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. The author is unworthy of His own characters.

~ Joe Hill

You sure you're all right? You aren't out here pondering dark female thoughts are you?

~ Joe Hill

The soul is an irrational, indivisible equation that perfectly expresses one thing: you. The soul would be no good to the devil if it could be destroyed. And it is not lost when placed in Satan's care, as is so often said. He always know exactly how to put his finger on it.

~ Joe Hill

Whatever your sexual orientation, whatever your ethnicity, whatever your age or personal experience, it is my hope you will find a hero somewhere here you can relate to, that speaks to the world as you see it. Even better: there is a good chance you will find some heroes who are deeply, fundamentally different from yourself. I don't have much patience with readers who yearn to explore incredible worlds and mind-bending situations but grow cold at the idea of imagining their way into different political ideas, different faiths, a different gender, a different skin, a different life.

~ Joe Hill

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 grandchildren. Death is a raw deal for narrative junkies.

~ Joe Hill

Humanity is worse than flies.

~ Joe Hill

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

~ Joe Hill

It bewildered Ig, the idea that a person could not be interested in music. It was like not being interested in happiness.

~ Joe Hill

He had no doubt that Merrin had called out to God here in this place while she was been raped and killed, in her heart if not with her voice. God's reply had been that due to the high volume of calls she could expect to be on hold until she was dead.

~ Joe Hill

Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.

~ Joe Hill

Eighteen and stupid happens to everyone, I guess. If you survive it, it's probably half luck, and half having the right people in your life to watch out for you.

~ Joe Hill

In this world, family is the final, most elemental unit of power. A small group, helplessly bound together by blood with a shared set of skills and tools for consolidating power and subjugating others.

~ Joe Hill

They had been Vince's brothers in a way, and Race was his son, and you couldn't drive a man's family to the earth and expect to live.

~ 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

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

I mean, when the world comes for your children, with the knives out, it's your job to stand in the way.

~ Joe Hill

Don't ever have children, Tyler, unless you're ready to be afraid everyday for the rest of your life.

~ 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

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

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

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

... 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

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

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

Writers were as parasitic, she supposed, as the spore itself.

~ Joe Hill

Everything that is good in the day is even better in the night.

~ Joe Hill

Horror was rooted in sympathy . . . in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst.

~ Joe Hill

Terror is the desire to save your own ass, but horror is rooted in sympathy.

~ Joe Hill

The dead pull the living down.

~ Joe Hill

He believed in his own decency with all his heart. So it was with every true monster, Vic supposed.

~ 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

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