Joe Hill Quotes

I wanted to explore this idea that the bogey man in the closet is scary, but being a mother is scarier.

~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

Death and ruin is man's preferred ecosystem.

~ 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

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

~ 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You loved me as hard as you knew how. I'd give anything to go back and love you better...

~ 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

I think if you cheat in a ethics class then there's really no hope for you.

~ 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 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

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

Gold don't come off. What's good stays good no matter how much of a beating it takes.

~ 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

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

To be honest, I think cell phones were invented by the devil.

~ 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

Taking a thing apart is always faster than putting something together. This is true of everything except marriage.

~ 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

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

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

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

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