Top 450 Joe Hill Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Some things you didn’t give away, no matter how much you owed.”

— Joe Hill

202. “Americans curse without any imagination at all.” Harper.”

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Joe Hill

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Joe Hill

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

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

— Joe Hill

224. “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

225. “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

226. “I’m not questioning your bravery. I’m questioning your intelligence.”

— Joe Hill

227. “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

228. “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

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

— Joe Hill

230. “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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

233. “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

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

— Joe Hill

235. “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

236. “No one looks too closely at a librarian. People are afraid of going blind from the glare of ssss-ssso much compressed wisdom. Check it out: I’m twenty years old, and I’m one of the top five SS-Scrabble players in the whole state. I guess that might say more about Iowa than it says about me.”

— Joe Hill

237. “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

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

— Joe Hill

239. “It was reassuring to know our national leaders were using all the resources at their disposal to help the desperate: social media and Jesus.”

— Joe Hill

240. “Her face was framed by two wings of lank black hair that curled under her long, pointed chin, so she looked like the female version of the wizard who was always giving Harry Potter such a hard time in the movies. Professor Snail or something.”

— Joe Hill

241. “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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

244. “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

245. “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

246. “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

247. “We have all been found guilty of being human. There are worse crimes.”

— Joe Hill

248. “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

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

— Joe Hill

250. “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