Top 450 Joe Hill Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I am a leaf on the wind,” Lou said, and the man-nurse said, “Dude, don’t say that. I don’t want to start crying on the job.”

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

104. “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

105. “A flock isn’t such a bad thing if you belong, but a few hundred starlings will tear an unlucky martin to feathers if it crosses their path.”

— Joe Hill

106. “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

107. “As a school nurse, she had always modeled herself on Mary Poppins, aiming for an air of good-tempered calm, self-assurance, a tolerance for play, but an expectation that the medicine would go down along with the spoonful of sugar. If the kids thought it was possible she might break into song and shoot fireworks from the tip of her umbrella, that was all right with her. Such.”

— Joe Hill

108. “Don’t waste time mourning. Organize.”

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

110. “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

111. “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

112. “I’ll take the shooting. I’m used to that. I’ve been shot a few times in the past, and I guess I can stand it, again.”

— Joe Hill

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Joe Hill

116. “Was there any human urge more pitiful-or more intense- than wanting another chance at something?”

— Joe Hill

117. “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

118. “Most human lives were and are too short. Most people have lived out their days hungry and barefoot, on the run from this war and that famine, a plague here and a flood there. But people have to sing anyway. Even a baby that hasn’t been fed in days will stop crying and look around when they hear someone singing in joy. You sing and it’s like giving a thirsty person water. It’s a kindness. It makes you shine.”

— Joe Hill

119. “Some work is about lying down for others, I suppose,” he says, and she realizes he is leaping up the last flight of stairs to a wide black glass landing and another set of bronze doors. “And some work is about lifting people up.”

— Joe Hill

120. “Humanity is a germ that thrives on the very edge of catastrophe.”

— Joe Hill

121. “If you Google “How do I write a book?” you’ll get a million hits, but here’s the dirty secret: It’s just math. It’s not even hard math – it’s first-grade addition. Write three pages a day, every day. In a hundred days, you’ll have three hundred pages. Type “The End.” Done.”

— Joe Hill

122. “Your impulse to protect me conflicts with my need to protect my self-respect. Sorry. Besides. I have this vaguely uneasy feeling you’re offering to protect me from you. That’s not doing me a kindness – that’s coercion.”

— Joe Hill

123. “It was no good being a mother. She wanted to start a website, a public-awareness campaign, a newsletter, to get the word out that if you were a woman and you had a child, you lost everything, you would be held hostage by love: a terrorist who would only be satisfied when you surrendered your entire future.”

— Joe Hill

124. “By the time I knew it was a mistake, it was too late to come back. That’s usually how it is.”

— Joe Hill

125. “She associated English accents with singing teapots, schools for witchcraft, and the science of deduction.”

— Joe Hill

126. “He searched the ground floor and found only shadow and stillness, which should’ve reassured him but didn’t. It was the wrong kind of stillness, the shocked stillness that follows the bang of a cherry bomb. His eardrums throbbed from the pressure of all that quiet, a dreadful silence.”

— Joe Hill

127. “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

128. “Harper Grayson had seen lots of people burn on TV, everyone had, but the first person she saw burn for real was in the playground behind the school. Schools.”

— Joe Hill

129. “It seemed to her sometimes that this was the only fight that mattered: the struggle to take the world’s chaos and make it mean something, to put it to words.”

— Joe Hill

130. “She was half talking to herself or, maybe more accurately, talking with her own private devil, a demon that just also happened to have Ig Perrish’s face.”

— Joe Hill

131. “If I die in a plane crash remember to always bag and board your comics.”

— Joe Hill

132. “Gail looked out at the water, wanting to hear it again, that soft foghorn sound, and she did, but it was inside her this time, the sound was down deep inside her, a long wordless cry for things that weren’t never going to happen.”

— Joe Hill

133. “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.”

— Joe Hill

134. “Your personality is not just a matter of what you know about yourself, but what others know about you. You are one person with your mother, and another with your lover, and yet another with your child. Those other people create you – finish you – as much as you create you.”

— Joe Hill

135. “He had long accepted that everyone had his own world inside, each as real as the communal world shared by all but impossible for others to access.”

— Joe Hill

136. “Most people have no idea how much of themselves they store off-site. Your personality is not just a matter of what you know about yourself, but what others know about you. You are one person with your mother, and another with your lover, and yet another with your child. Those other people create you – finish you – as much as you create you. When you’re gone, the ones you’ve left behind get to keep the same part of you they always had.” She.”

— Joe Hill

137. “Humanity is worse than flies.”

— Joe Hill

138. “I have nothing to say for myself, only that I have always tried to make this earth a little bit better.”

— Joe Hill

139. “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

140. “She was working on the eighth step of her program and was here in Haverhill to make amends. For years she had not wanted Linda to know Wayne, to be a part of his life. She took pleasure in limiting her mother’s contact with the boy, felt it was her job to protect Wayne from Linda. She wished now there had been someone to protect Wayne from herself. She had amends to make to him, too.”

— Joe Hill

141. “It was hard to venture back near the place you’d been bred without settling into the characteristics of the person you’d been there.”

— Joe Hill

142. “On the other hand, it was a well-known fact that cell phones were tools of the devil. He selected.”

— Joe Hill

143. “Folks woke up today to a poisoned world, and some of them won’t see any reason to hold back on doing the awful things they’ve always dreamed of.”

— Joe Hill

144. “When I get excited about a movie I need to talk.”

— Joe Hill

145. “Any business model based around poor people making bad decisions out of ignorance and desperation always works.”

— Joe Hill

146. “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. You have to care for each other or you walk on cinders, a matchstick ready to be struck.”

— Joe Hill

147. “You could just tell she was the best kind of trouble.”

— Joe Hill

148. “Some part of her felt that the existence of the bridge depended utterly on forward motion and not thinking too much.”

— Joe Hill

149. “It took a clever man to figure out a way to make a profit off his bad habits.”

— Joe Hill

150. “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