Top 450 Joe Hill Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Don’t mourn, Organise.”

— Joe Hill

2. “And he paddled away in his douche canoe.”

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

4. “I will die like a true-blue rebel. Don’t waste any time in mourning – organize.”

— Joe Hill

5. “It’s quite common to enter a library and find yourself in conversation with the dead. The best minds of generations long gone crowd every bookshelf. They wait there to be noticed, to be addressed, and to reply in turn. In the library the dead meet the living on collegial terms as a matter of course, every day.”

— Joe Hill

6. “You’re people, too. Do something nice for yourself.”

— Joe Hill

7. “I tell writers not to think about writing short stories or novels. Just write one good scene. And then a novel becomes a bunch of good scenes stacked on top of each other.”

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

9. “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

10. “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

11. “The best way to get even with anyone is to put them in the rearview mirror on your way to something better.”

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

13. “You know someone for a while and then one day a hole opens underneath them, and they fall out of your world.”

— Joe Hill

14. “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

15. “Work and pray, live on hay, youll get pie in the sky when you die.”

— Joe Hill

16. “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

17. “To live for others was to live fully; to live only for yourself, a cold kind of death.”

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

19. “It sounded like delusion until you remembered that 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

20. “Pi is an irrational number, incapable of being made into a fraction, impossible to divide from itself. So, too, the soul is an irrational, indivisible equation that perfectly expresses one thing: you.”

— Joe Hill

21. “Even after you lost someone, it turned out you still had a relationship with that person, one you needed to tend to as you would tend to a relationship with any living friend or relative.”

— Joe Hill

22. “He understood that the ghost existed first and foremost within his own head. That maybe ghosts always haunted minds, not places.”

— Joe Hill

23. “Death and ruin is man’s preferred ecosystem. Did you ever read about the bacterium that thrives in volcanoes, right on the edge of boiling rock? That’s us. Humanity is a germ that thrives on the very edge of catastrophe.”

— Joe Hill

24. “You won’t do anyone any good if you drop dead of exhaustion,” she said to Harper once. I won’t do anyone any good if I don’t, Harper imagined saying back. I’m not doing anyone any good, one way or another. But she didn’t say it. It would’ve been grief talking, and it was unfair to unload her sadness.”

— Joe Hill

25. “Maybe all the schemes of the devil were nothing compared to what man could think up.”

— Joe Hill

26. “If the workers took a notion they could stop all speeding trains; every ship upon the ocean they can tie with mighty chains.”

— Joe Hill

27. “What a blessed if painful thing, this business of being alive.”

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

29. “But God fears women even more that 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

30. “Sooner or later a black car came for everyone.”

— Joe Hill

31. “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

32. “She just knew that even when you had nothing, you still had love.”

— Joe Hill

33. “Gold don’t come off. What’s good stays good no matter how much of a beating it takes.”

— Joe Hill

34. “You ever find a cat sleeping in a ray of sun? There’s a sound over there. It’s a golden sound. That’s the only way to describe it. It’s a bright sound, and it has little flecks of music in it, drifting like motes of dust. And you just know if you let that sound get inside you, if you hummed along with it, you’d rest like a cat in the sun. A perfect rest. You could rest a billion years.”

— Joe Hill

35. “Who knows what may lie around the next corner? There may be a window somewhere ahead. It may look out on a field of sunflowers.”

— Joe Hill

36. “I will be waiting by candlelight in our tree house of the mind.”

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

38. “I was less a social butterfly than a social death’s-head moth.”

— Joe Hill

39. “He understood that the ghost existed first and foremost within his own head. That maybe ghosts always haunted minds, not places. If he wanted to take a shot at it, he’d have to turn the barrel against his own temple.”

— Joe Hill

40. “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

41. “She’d thought love had something to do with happiness, but it turned out they were not even vaguely related. Love was closer to a need, no different from the need to eat, to breathe.”

— Joe Hill

42. “Goddamn bloody arsefoam. Daddy drilling Mommy on the kitchen table.”

— Joe Hill

43. “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

44. “I remind myself that no one day of writing matters all that much. A story is built somewhat like a stalactite – one little drip of mud and grit at a time.”

— Joe Hill

45. “Were talking about an attitude. Delayed gratification is there, planning, be able to give up something now to get something later.”

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

47. “The dead pull the living down.”

— Joe Hill

48. “She ran into the early-October afternoon. The light came at a low slant through the oaks across the street, gold and green, and how she loved that light. There was no light in the world like you saw in New England in early fall.”

— Joe Hill

49. “Spit spot was a favorite of Mary Poppins, and Harper had, since childhood, liked to substitute Julie Andrews–isms for profanity whenever possible. It gave her a steely feeling of control and reminded her of her best self at the same time.”

— Joe Hill

50. “The people in charge can always justify doing terrible things in the name of the greater good.”

— Joe Hill