Top 450 Joe Hill Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Jude wondered if the chip was smart enough to tell the difference between a dog and a naked psychotic scrambling around on all fours with a knife in his teeth.”

— Joe Hill

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Joe Hill

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

260. “He was often crushed by the decency of other people who had almost nothing themselves; at times he felt their kindnesses so powerfully he thought it would destroy some delicate inner part of him.”

— Joe Hill

261. “Outlaws like to sleep in. I’ve been FBI for eight years, and I’ve never once had cause to shoot anyone before eleven in the morning. Not as long as I get my coffee anyway.”

— Joe Hill

262. “I feel like most folks want a book they feel like they have time to finish. You don’t want to start A Game of Thrones when you might catch fire all of a sudden. 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. Of course, I suppose everyone always dies in the middle of a good story, in a sense. Your own story. Or the story of your children. Or your grandchildren. Death is a raw deal for narrative junkies.” Around.”

— Joe Hill

263. “If hell was anything, it was talk radio – and family.”

— Joe Hill

264. “Whatever the children had become, whatever he had done to them, he had done to make them safe, to keep them from being run down by the world. He believed in his own decency with all his heart.”

— Joe Hill

265. “It’s awfully good of some people to have asked me to take the job, but I’d rather read about a grand escape than plan one. Besides, I’m terrible at keeping secrets and I hate to scheme against people. It seems rude. I don’t deal with guilt well and I’m worried we might hurt some feelings in the process of defending ourselves. Also, I am juggling a couple of books. Being a full-time conspirator would take away from my reading time.”

— Joe Hill

266. “The best works of art have a tendency to fall through time differently than human beings. They remember, but they also anticipate. A good piece can mean different things to different people at different times, and all of those meanings are true, even if they contradict one another.”

— Joe Hill

267. “The Locke family were my teachers and Keyhouse was my school. I learned from you that in this world, family is the final, most elemental unit of power.”

— Joe Hill

268. “Everything that is good in the day is even better in the night. A merry-go-round, a ferris wheel, a kiss from a girl.”

— Joe Hill

269. “Lee would learn the truth about music: that it was the third rail of life. You grabbed it to shock yourself out of the dull drag of hours, to feel something, to burn with all the emotions you didn’t get to experience in the ordinary run of school and TV and loading the dishwasher after dinner.”

— Joe Hill

270. “Christmas was almost four months in the rearview mirror, and there was something awful about Christmas music when it was nearly summer. It was like a clown in the rain, with his makeup running.”

— Joe Hill

271. “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. The Lotus Way might lead to nirvana, but it was a long trip, and when you had a lot of miles to cover, it was just natural to want some drive-thru along the road.”

— Joe Hill

272. “You’re useful to me. Every day. Every hour. Anyone who knows how to love is useful to someone.”

— Joe Hill

273. “Imagination was a cancer of the heart. All those lives you carried around in your head that you wouldn’t ever get to live – they filled you up until you couldn’t breathe.”

— Joe Hill

274. “Do you like eighties music, Nurse Willowes?” “Can we discuss the oldies another time?” “What? What? The oldies? I’ve already had a man kicking in my ribs, and now you pull out my heart.” “Hey!”

— Joe Hill

275. “Heroism was exhausting business.”

— Joe Hill

276. “The past is always close, so close you can sing along with it, anytime you like.”

— Joe Hill

277. “The key is to keep things simple.”

— Joe Hill

278. “Everything that is good in the day is even better in the night.”

— Joe Hill

279. “Why do you got to ask so many damn questions?” he wanted to know. As they went back out into the rain, he opened his black duster and closed it over her thin, shivering body, clasped her against him. “I’d rather ask questions,” she said, “than answer them.”

— Joe Hill

280. “So many have wept for Jesus on His cross. As if no one else has ever suffered as He suffered. As if millions have not shuffled to worse deaths, and died unremembered.”

— Joe Hill

281. “He had his flaws – he’d voted for Reagan, he believed that Carl Weathers was a GREAT thespian, and he grew emotional listening to ABBA.”

— Joe Hill

282. “I’d netted a bachelor’s in English from Boston University, but it had done less for me, in strictly financial terms, than the eight-week course that earned me a commercial driver’s license.”

— Joe Hill

283. “Your beard and your big leather jacket and your big black car and your big black boots. No one puts on all that armor unless they been hurt by someone who didn’t have no right to hurt them.”

— Joe Hill

284. “Kids always think they’re coming into a story at the beginning, when usually they’re coming in at the end.”

— Joe Hill

285. “That’s what I mean. I thought it was only in filthy places no one wants to go, like Chernobyl and Detroit.”

— Joe Hill

286. “Maybe they were afraid of being quarantined. The idea of being kept from your loved ones is scarier than the sickness for a lot of people. No one wants to die alone.”

— Joe Hill

287. “She was down the street and around the corner when she realized she hadn’t put anything on besides the jacket and her boots. She was tramping around greater Denver at two in the morning in her faded pink panties. At least she had remembered the whiskey.”

— Joe Hill

288. “He felt that when his little men were painted well, they possessed a tension, a suggestion that they might, at any moment, begin to move on their own and charge the French line.”

— Joe Hill

289. “The mad sometimes drilled holes in their own heads, to let the demons out, to relieve the pressure of thoughts they could no longer bear.”

— Joe Hill

290. “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.”

— Joe Hill

291. “The wind surged, and a burst of rain, barely a dozen drops, struck the blacktop ahead of me, producing the smell that is one of the finest odors in the world, the fragrance of hot asphalt in a summer shower.”

— Joe Hill

292. “I want that on my gravestone. Snuffleupagus was real. No more. Just that.”

— Joe Hill

293. “Fear does not incline people to be moderate in their use of extreme tactics.”

— Joe Hill

294. “The road to Christmasland is paved in dreams!”

— Joe Hill

295. “The human condition: It was contagious, apparently.”

— Joe Hill

296. “They led me into things that I regretted in the moment but were later a pleasure to remember. Real sin, I think, produces the same emotions, in the exact opposite order.”

— Joe Hill

297. “Give a man a choice between reality and loneliness or fantasy and community, he’ll pick having friends every time.”

— Joe Hill

298. “She wrote she heard them hammering nails all day long and that it was like living next to a coffin maker after a plague. When.”

— Joe Hill

299. “He did not hate his wife, but felt for her the kind of affection a man usually reserves for an excitable puppy. Her immediate acceptance of his every opinion and observation was both disheartening and a little hilarious to him. There was not a single criticism he could offer that she would not immediately accept as true. He made a game out of it.”

— Joe Hill

300. “The people who had witnessed the mushroom cloud rising from Hiroshima could’ve felt no less.”

— Joe Hill