Top 450 Joe Hill Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “The people in charge can always justify doing terrible things in the name of the greater good.”

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

53. “It was something... the way a person’s life picked up speed, the way a life was like a bullet aimed at one final target, impossible to slow or turn aside, and like the bullet, you were ignorant of what you were going to hit, would never know anything except the rush and the impact.”

— Joe Hill

54. “I finally found my way back, Ig. I’m okay. I’m where it’s safe.”

— Joe Hill

55. “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

56. “The dead pull the living down.”

— Joe Hill

57. “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

58. “I know all about bridges like that one. I know all about roads that can only be found with the mind. One of them is how I find my way to Christmasland. There is the Night Road, and the train tracks to Orphanhenge, and the doors to Mid-World, and the old trail to the Tree House of the Mind, and then there is Victoria’s wonderful covered bridge.”

— Joe Hill

59. “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

60. “You can’t let facts get in the way of the truth.”

— Joe Hill

61. “The blood of a redheaded woman is three degrees cooler than the blood of a normal woman. This has been established by medical studies.”

— Joe Hill

62. “You loved me as hard as you knew how. I’d give anything to go back and love you better...”

— Joe Hill

63. “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

64. “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

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

— Joe Hill

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “I am; I was. I want to be.”

— Joe Hill

70. “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

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

— Joe Hill

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

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

— Joe Hill

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

90. “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

91. “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

92. “She was sitting on the floor, beneath the phone, with her arms wrapped around her, when Lou found her. “You been, like, sitting out here for a while,” he said. “Do you want me to bring you a blanket or a dead tauntaun or something?”

— Joe Hill

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

98. “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

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

— Joe Hill

100. “He’s like the tiger shark in Jaws. The one Dreyfuss cuts open in the fisherman’s basement. That’s why we named him Hooper. You remember the tiger shark? He had a license plate in his stomach?” “I never saw Jaws. I caught one of the sequels on TV in rehab. The one with Michael Caine.” Another silence followed, this one awestruck and wondering. “Jesus. No wonder we didn’t last,” Lou said.”

— Joe Hill