Top 450 Joe Hill Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “You loved me as hard as you knew how. I’d give anything to go back and love you better...”

— Joe Hill

52. “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

53. “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

54. “Innocence ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know. Innocent little kids rip the wings off flies, because they don’t know any better. That’s innocence.”

— Joe Hill

55. “The dead win when you quit singing and let them take you on down the road with them.”

— Joe Hill

56. “You’re guileless, Lou. That’s one of the reasons I love you.” He lifted his head and gave her a wondering stare. “I do, you know,” she said. “It’s not your fault I made such a rotten mess of everything. It’s not your fault I’m such a colossal fuckup.” Lou bowed his head and considered this. “Aren’t you going to tell me I’m not so bad?” she asked. “Mmm-no. I was thinking how every man loves a hot girl with a history of making mistakes. Because it’s always possible she’ll make one with you.”

— Joe Hill

57. “When you think about it, most of the good ideas came along to make sin a whole lot easier.”

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

59. “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

60. “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

61. “One of the extraordinary adaptive powers of our species is its ability to transmute a stray encounter into a first chapter.”

— Joe Hill

62. “How she loved the smell of road: asphalt baking and soft in high July, dirt roads with their dust-and-pollen perfume in June, country lanes spicy with the odor of crushed leaves in sober October, the sand-and-salt smell of the highway, so like an estuary, in February.”

— Joe Hill

63. “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

64. “The sky was the color of a migraine.”

— Joe Hill

65. “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

66. “Aren’t you going to tell me I’m not so bad? she asked. Mmm-no. I was thinking how every man loves a hot girl with a history of making mistakes. Because it’s always possible she’ll make one with you.”

— Joe Hill

67. “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

68. “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

69. “I have known others who could use totems of their own to turn reality inside out. To reshape it like the soft clay it is. There was Craddock McDermott, who claimed that his spirit existed in a favorite suit of his.”

— Joe Hill

70. “I’ve always thought that when something really bad happens to a person, other people just have to know about it. You can’t be a tree falling in the woods with no one to hear you crash.”

— Joe Hill

71. “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

72. “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

73. “I told you had to be some kind of karmic opposite to the words I love you.”

— Joe Hill

74. “In a friendship, especially in a friendship between two young boys, you are allowed to inflict a certain amount of pain. This is even expected. But you must cause no serious injury; you must never, under any circumstances, leave wounds that will result in permanent scars.”

— Joe Hill

75. “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

76. “I miss you, Jude. I’m looking forward to putting my arms around you. We’re going to sing just like the old days. Everyone sings here. After a while it kind of sounds like screaming. Just listen. Listen and you can hear them screaming.”

— Joe Hill

77. “There are no unselfish acts. When people do something for someone else, it’s always for their own personal psychological reasons.”

— Joe Hill

78. “No. You can’t understand. Because you’re reading the last chapter of something without having read the first chapter. You’re a little guy, Bode. Kids always think they’re coming into a story at the beginning, when they’re usually coming in at the end.”

— Joe Hill

79. “Usually you can only catch the Sasquatch blur of your own legendary moments in the side mirrors.”

— Joe Hill

80. “Out of the frying pan and into the Fireman.”

— Joe Hill

81. “The girl’s pretty little-girl face had deformed, lips stretching wide, becoming like the mouth of a flukeworm, a ragged pink hole encircled with teeth going all the way down her gullet. Her tongue was black, and her breath stank of old meat.”

— Joe Hill

82. “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?”

— Joe Hill

83. “So much of what was best in life went unnoticed in the moments you had it.”

— Joe Hill

84. “What frightened him was not the thought that he was a prisoner of Charlie Manx but that for a moment he had forgotten he was a prisoner. For a moment he had been admiring the light and feeling almost happy.”

— Joe Hill

85. “Silence is the purest form of harmony.”

— Joe Hill

86. “The child outliving the parents is the only happy story us human beings get.”

— Joe Hill

87. “Harper had had enough of the porcupine and enough of the drainage pipe. She scooped the stick right under his rear end and shoved him along ahead of her. She felt this had the makings of a new Olympic sport: porcupine curling. The.”

— Joe Hill

88. “She came back from the eighties to save mankind. Martha Quinn is our only hope.”

— Joe Hill

89. “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

90. “Death is a raw deal for narrative junkies.”

— Joe Hill

91. “The whole world can burn down around us. I’ll keep my arms around you until the end.”

— Joe Hill

92. “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. What you are giving away then is your own soul.”

— Joe Hill

93. “Silence is the purest form of harmony. Everyone ought to try it. Put a stone in your mouth instead of a lie. Put a rock on your tongue instead of gossip. Bury the liars and the wicked under stones until they say no more. More weight, hallelujah.”

— Joe Hill

94. “The language of sin was universal, the original Esperanto.”

— Joe Hill

95. “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

96. “I remember Aslan dead on the stone and the mice nibbling at the ropes that bound his corpse. I think that provided me with my foundational sense of decency. To live a decent life is to be no more than a mouse nibbling at a rope. One mouse isn’t much, but if enough of us keep chewing, we may set something free that can save us from the worst. Maybe it will even save us from ourselves.”

— Joe Hill

97. “She wanted to believe that information brought clarity. Not for the first time in her life, however, she had the disconcerting notion that it was often the opposite. Information was a jar of flies, and when you unscrewed the lid, they went everywhere and good luck to you trying to round them all up again.”

— Joe Hill

98. “That was one thing you found out when you were stoned, or wasted, or feverish: that the world was always turning and that only a healthy mind could block out the sickening whirl of it.”

— Joe Hill

99. “No. I don’t think so. It isn’t about whether I die. It’s about figuring out where. And I’ve decided. I’m going to see how high I can go. I want to see if it’s true. If the sky opens up at the top.”

— Joe Hill

100. “Arson is almost as good as Prozac.”

— Joe Hill