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

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

— Joe Hill

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Joe Hill

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

161. “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

162. “Don’t believe everything you hear today.”

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

178. “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

179. “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

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

— Joe Hill

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

186. “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

187. “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

188. “Jude had a private collection.”

— Joe Hill

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

192. “Sometimes it seemed to him he was allergic to expressing himself. Often, when he desperately wanted to say a thing, he could actually feel his windpipe closing up on him, cutting off his air.”

— Joe Hill

193. “Wayne didn’t interact with nature. He took pictures of it with his iPhone and then bent over the screen and poked at it. His favorite thing about the lake house was that it had Wi-Fi.”

— Joe Hill

194. “I had discovered some time ago that nothing frees the mind like dropping the pants. Try it if you doubt me. American productivity would, I believe, nearly double if everyone were free to work pantsless.”

— Joe Hill

195. “Then, for a while, it was quite still in the old foundry, where the man and the devil lay side by side – although which was which would perhaps have been a matter for theological debate.”

— Joe Hill

196. “She seemed almost to have a perverse impulse to make anyone who cared about her regret it, to find the thing that would most appall those people and then do that until they had to run away as a matter of self-preservation.”

— Joe Hill

197. “Ideas are as real as rocks.”

— Joe Hill

198. “When she wasn’t painting, when she didn’t have creative work to occupy her, she became aware of a growing physical apprehension, like she was standing beneath a crane that was holding a piano aloft; at any moment she felt that the cables could snap and all that weight could fall upon her with a fatal crash.”

— Joe Hill

199. “Her anger didn’t have a fixed point.”

— Joe Hill

200. “The idea that her death should precede his was worse than intolerable, it was obscene.”

— Joe Hill