Top 450 Joe Hill Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “I think if you cheat in a ethics class then there’s really no hope for you.”

— Joe Hill

154. “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

155. “Ecstasy? Like the drug?” Michelle asked. “Wow. Trippy. They were into that back then?” “No. Not like the drug. Like fun. She’s a symbol of never-ending fun.”

— Joe Hill

156. “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

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

— Joe Hill

158. “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

159. “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

160. “It’s easy to dismiss religion as bloody, cruel, and tribal. I’ve done it myself. But it isn’t religion that’s wired that way – it’s man himself. At bottom every faith is a form of instruction in common decency. Different textbooks in the same class. Don’t they all teach that to do for others feels better than to do for yourself? That someone else’s happiness need not mean less happiness for you?”

— Joe Hill

161. “Death and ruin is man’s preferred ecosystem.”

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

163. “He had tried to explain the way he felt to Danny once, about compulsive behavior and time rushing too fast and the Internet and drugs. Danny had only lifted one of his slender, mobile eyebrows and stared at him in smirking confusion. Danny did not think coke and computers were anything alike. But Jude had seen the way people hunched over their screens, clicking the refresh button again and again, waiting for some crucial if meaningless hit of information, and he thought it was almost exactly the same.”

— Joe Hill

164. “But before that there’d been summer days in the barn while he rebuilt the Mustang. There’d been John Prine on the radio, the sweet smell of hay baking in the heat, and afternoons filled with her lazy, pointless questions – a never-ending interrogation that was, at turns, tiresome, amusing, and erotic. There’d been her body, tattooed and icy white, with the bony knees and skinny thighs of a long-distance runner. There’d been her breath on his neck.”

— Joe Hill

165. “Jude had a private collection.”

— Joe Hill

166. “He had heard it the way he wanted to hear it. He had known what he had wanted to know. Maybe it was always that way for almost everyone.”

— Joe Hill

167. “As she stood there looking about, that radio sound resolved into the bluff baritone of Burl Ives, encouraging all the world to have a holly jolly Christmas, and never mind it was the third week of March. The voice was coming from the attached garage, a dingy building with a single roll-up door and four square windows looking into it, milky with filth.”

— Joe Hill

168. “Danny did not think coke and computers were anything alike. But Jude had seen the way people hunched over their screens, clicking the refresh button again and again, waiting for some crucial if meaningless hit of information, and he thought it was almost exactly the same.”

— Joe Hill

169. “If you were going to live in hell on earth, there was something to be said for being one of the devils.”

— Joe Hill

170. “In the winter, when you’re cold, the world extends no more than a foot in any direction.”

— Joe Hill

171. “Keys turn both ways. You can lock something away... But you can also throw a bolt and set something free.”

— Joe Hill

172. “It was as if the day’s whole motion had merely described a great circle that was always, inevitably, going to lead him back to where he had started.”

— Joe Hill

173. “When it came to producing a state of focus, quiet contentment, and inner peace, Zen meditation ran a very distant second to caffeine.”

— Joe Hill

174. “Reality had briefly slid aside one of its black, opaque panels, to give him a glimpse of the gears that ticked behind it. Saunders had discovered a universal constant, like gravity or the quantum nature of light. No matter where you went – no matter how ancient the traditions, no matter how grand the history, no matter how awe-inspiring the landscape – there was always a market for a cheap Happy Meal.”

— Joe Hill

175. “The memory of that day in the dump made him a little sentimental for his father – they had had some good times together, and Buddy had made a decent meal in the end. Really, what else could you ask from a parent?”

— Joe Hill

176. “Talking to her now was like flailing his hands at a storm of hornets. It did nothing, and it stung, and yet he couldn’t stop himself.”

— Joe Hill

177. “The pills I take are a paperweight. All they do is pin the fantasies down. But they’re still there, and any strong wind that comes along, I can feel them rattling around, trying to slip free.”

— Joe Hill

178. “He’d possessed all the key elements of a school shooter: hormones, misery, ammunition. People wondered how something like Columbine could happen. Jude wondered why it didn’t happen more often.”

— Joe Hill

179. “He had always known he would go out this way: on fire. He had always known that rage was flammable, dangerous to store under pressure, where he had kept it his whole life.”

— Joe Hill

180. “Just think, if you had a gun” he said to her “This story might have a different ending.”

— Joe Hill

181. “The last man she’d dated said something to her, shortly before they broke up: “I don’t know, maybe I’m boring, but I never really feel like you’re there when we’re out to dinner. You live in your head. I can’t. No room for me in there. I don’t know, maybe you’d be more interested in me if I were a book.”

— Joe Hill

182. “As a world of shared ideas, Twitter is a kind of Inscape in and of itself, and a good one.”

— Joe Hill

183. “Basically, it comes down do this: You can live life as a cripple or a coward. What happens now is up to you.”

— Joe Hill

184. “Getting old is no way to stop being young.”

— Joe Hill

185. “The girl worked the clutch and the gas and the brake expertly with her right foot, just as her father had taught her.”

— Joe Hill

186. “Sometimes it seemed that one of the stars came loose from the firmament and sailed off with dizzying speed to a far corner of the night. In the dark hours before sunrise, constellations came apart and reformed and fell in burning streaks.”

— Joe Hill

187. “People just have to keep on going, because you never know when something wonderful is going to happen.”

— Joe Hill

188. “It was bad enough to be stuck in a pipe with a porcupine, worse to be in there with a lunatic, even if the lunatic happened to be herself.”

— Joe Hill

189. “If you hated someone, she was at least worthy of your passion.”

— Joe Hill

190. “They had forgotten their own names, the voices of their mothers, the faces of their fathers.”

— Joe Hill

191. “He knew, too, from things Vic had not told him, that she missed him and loved him with an intensity perhaps matched only by what she felt for her son.”

— Joe Hill

192. “It went to show that no one knew, when they abandoned a thing, what misuses it would be put to later by others.”

— Joe Hill

193. “She banged the stick against the side of the pipe, drew it back, and lanced it at the porcupine. “I’ll be a candle right up your ass, you don’t keep waddling, fat boy,” she half sang, half choked. He.”

— Joe Hill

194. “That night Lee suffered overheated, sexually complicated dreams; he dreamed that Merrin was naked in his bed, and he sat on top of her arms and held her down while he forced a funnel into her mouth, a red plastic funnel, and then poured gasoline into it, and she began to buck under him as in orgasm.”

— Joe Hill

195. “It did no good to tell himself that it was all in his head if it went on happening anyway. His belief was not required; his disbelief of was no consequence.”

— Joe Hill

196. “It is my belief that, as a rule, creatures of Happy’s ilk – I am thinking here of canines and men both – more often run free than live caged, and it is in fact a world of mud and feces they desire, a world with no Art in it, or anyone like him, a place where there is no talk of books or God or the worlds beyond this world, a place where the only communication is the hysterical barking of starving and hate-filled dogs.”

— Joe Hill

197. “In her experience it was very difficult to offer a man affection and kindness without giving him the impression you were also offering a lay.”

— Joe Hill

198. “He thought the government was trying to enslave humanity by controlling grammar.”

— Joe Hill

199. “It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself. – G. Greene Harper.”

— Joe Hill

200. “People have pretty rubbery brains. They can take quite a bit of bouncing around. Come on. Band-Aids and tea. And answers. They’re all right this way.”

— Joe Hill