Top 450 Joe Hill Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

104. “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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

107. “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

108. “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

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

— Joe Hill

110. “The man-nurse was his age and had sleepy eyes with dark circles under them, and a jutting Cro-Magnon forehead. His name tag said, improbably, bilbo. He had a spaceship tattooed on one hairy forearm: Serenity from the TV show Firefly. “ ‘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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

113. “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

114. “It is all right to cry but don’t give up on laughter. Don’t give up on happiness. You need both. I had both.”

— Joe Hill

115. “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

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

— Joe Hill

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

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

— Joe Hill

124. “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

125. “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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “It was bad enough that she had been so utterly convinced he had a brilliant mind, but much worse to discover he was convinced of it, too, and on such thin evidence. It.”

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

141. “Humanity is worse than flies.”

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

143. “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

144. “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

145. “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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

148. “It was incomprehensible that her entire life had been a carousel of unhappiness, drinking, failed promises, and loneliness, all turning around and around a single afternoon encounter with this man.”

— Joe Hill

149. “A lot of his songs, when they started out, sounded like old music. They arrived on his doorstep, wandering orphans, the lost children of large and venerable musical families. They came to him in the form of Tin Pan Alley sing-alongs, honky-tonk blues, Dust Bowl plaints, lost Chuck Berry riffs. Jude dressed them in black and taught them to scream.”

— Joe Hill

150. “I have to tell you, heroin dealers and meth slingers have made your country a wretched place to be a simple, honest drug dealer who wants to give his customers a lovingly curated experience.”

— Joe Hill