Top 450 Joe Hill Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “Lindy became an instructor at an upscale gym, where she taught aerobic pole dancing.”

— Joe Hill

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Joe Hill

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “You could look at birds all your life without ever knowing what was a sparrow and what was a blackbird, but we all know a swan when we see it.”

— Joe Hill

209. “Too many people die in hospitals, and if you can’t be helped, you have to wonder why.”

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

211. “There are two infections running rampant. One is the Dragonscale, and the other is panic.”

— Joe Hill

212. “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

213. “The price of being alive is that someday you aren’t.”

— Joe Hill

214. “It was like wondering how evil had come into the world or what happens to a person after he dies: an interesting philosophical exercise, but also curiously pointless, since evil and death happened, regardless of the why and the how and what-it-meant.”

— Joe Hill

215. “People would believe almost any awful thing their private devil told them.”

— Joe Hill

216. “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

217. “His father had smashed his very first guitar for him, in an early attempt to rid Jude of his musical ambitions. Jude hadn’t been able to repeat the act himself, not even onstage, for show, when he could afford all the guitars he wanted. He was, however, perfectly willing to use one as a weapon to defend himself. In a sense he supposed he had always used them as weapons.”

— Joe Hill

218. “Sometimes Wayne felt that the world had been sliding apart beneath his feet for years. He was still waiting for it to pull him down, to bury him at last.”

— Joe Hill

219. “She’d thought love had something to do with happiness, but it turned out they were not even vaguely related. Love was closer to a need, no different from the need to eat, to breathe. When Wayne fell asleep, his hot cheek against her naked breast, his lips smelling sweetly of the milk from her own body, she felt as if she was the one who had been fed.”

— Joe Hill

220. “Pi is an irrational number, incapable of being made into a fraction, impossible to divide from itself. So, too, the soul is an irrational, indivisible equation that perfectly expresses one thing: you.”

— Joe Hill

221. “It was impossible to have a conversation in a room with a phone. It was like having a conversation in a room with a bat hanging from the ceiling. Even if the bat was asleep, how were you supposed to think about anything else or look at anything else?”

— Joe Hill

222. “He paused, twisting his goatee, considering the law in Deuteronomy that forbade clothes with mixed fibers. A problematic bit of Scripture. A matter that required thought. “Only the devil wants man to have a wide range of lightweight and comfortable styles to choose from,” he murmured at last, trying out a new proverb. “Although there may be no forgiveness for polyester. On this one matter, Satan and the Lord are in agreement.”

— Joe Hill

223. “I put the Fifth of November and the Fourth of July to shame. Who needs Roman candles when you’ve got me?”

— Joe Hill

224. “Harper wondered, idly, why it took getting contaminated to notice the marriage itself was sick. He.”

— Joe Hill

225. “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

226. “Maturity is not something that happens all at once. It is not a border between two countries where once you cross the invisible line, you are on the new soil of adulthood, speaking the foreign tongue of grown-ups. It is more like a distant broadcast, and you are driving toward it, and sometimes you can barely make it out through the hiss of static while other times the reception momentarily clears and you can pick up the signal with perfect clarity.”

— Joe Hill

227. “He was poured forth into a thunderous torrent of souls, ejected from the earth and any sense of order and into this other, older chaos.”

— Joe Hill

228. “He believed in his own decency with all his heart. So it was with every true monster, Vic supposed.”

— Joe Hill

229. “I’m not supposed to suh-ss-sleep in the library, but Ms. Howard lets me get away with it if it’s only now and then. She pities me, because I’m an orphan and kind of weird. That’s okay. I don’t mind. People make out like it’s a terrible thing to be pitied, but I say, Hey! I get to sleep in a library and read books all night! Without pity, where would I be? I’m a total pity s-s-ssslut.”

— Joe Hill

230. “She liked things that had been written by people who had lived short, ugly, and tragic lives. Or, who at least, were English.”

— Joe Hill

231. “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. Her.”

— Joe Hill

232. “That uncomfortable buzzing in your head is the hum of thought. I know the sensation must be quite unfamiliar.”

— Joe Hill

233. “I do not claim that God is dead. I tell you. He is alive and well but in no position to offer salvation, being damned Himself for His lacrimal indifference. He was lost the moment He demanded fealty and worship before He would offer His protection. The unmistakeable bargain of a gangster. Whereas the devil is anything but indifferent. The devil is always there to help those who are ready to sin, which is another word for ‘live’.”

— Joe Hill

234. “She didn’t like to feel things so intensely. It reminded her of being crazy.”

— Joe Hill

235. “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.”

— Joe Hill

236. “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.”

— Joe Hill

237. “In truth, Jude suspected that Danny had no particular musical preferences, no strong likes or dislikes, and that the radio was just background sound, the auditory equivalent of wallpaper.”

— Joe Hill

238. “Terry was cool, cooler then Ig would ever be, but he was afraid. His fear narrowed his vision so that he couldn’t see anything except what he stood to lose.”

— Joe Hill

239. “It bewildered Ig, the idea that a person could not be interested in music. It was like not being interested in happiness.”

— Joe Hill

240. “He had been a demon for just two days, but the time when he knew what it was like to be loved seemed to exist in a hazily recalled past, to have been left behind long ago.”

— Joe Hill

241. “Humanity is worse than flies. If even one dried nugget of offal survives the flames, we’ll be swarming all over it. Fighting about who owns it and selling the most fragrant chunks to the wealthy and the gullible.”

— Joe Hill

242. “Love requires Context.”

— Joe Hill

243. “At first my father didn’t like Art, but after he got to know him better he really hated him.”

— Joe Hill

244. “People were entranced by flame and repelled by human suffering, and wasn’t that some kind of design flaw?”

— Joe Hill

245. “The beard was actually less Dumbledore, more Hemingway, but the eyes behind the lenses of his glasses were a brilliant shade of blue that naturally suggested a man who could cast runes and speak to trees. Harper.”

— Joe Hill

246. “That’s not real good goddamn timing.” “Artery stenosis is famously inconvenient,” Bilbo said. “It never calls in advance. Just drops in to party whenever it feels like it.”

— Joe Hill

247. “He threw the Bible into the trumpet case as well. There had to be something in there, some useful tips for his situation, a homeopathic remedy that you could apply when you came down with a bad case of the devil.”

— Joe Hill

248. “I am always with you. Love never burns away. It just keeps on and on.”

— Joe Hill

249. “Pick a sin we can both live with, is what I ask.”

— Joe Hill

250. “It didn’t make any logical sense for her to be worried, although Ig knew that worry and logic rarely traveled together.”

— Joe Hill