Top 450 Joe Hill Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Joe Hill

253. “Love requires Context.”

— Joe Hill

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Joe Hill

257. “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

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

— Joe Hill

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

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

— Joe Hill

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “Heroism was exhausting business.”

— Joe Hill

273. “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

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

— Joe Hill

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

283. “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

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

— Joe Hill

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

295. “There were little triangles of coconut custard pie on a graham cracker crust for dessert, the best and sweetest thing...”

— Joe Hill

296. “Ig laughed at that. The things people said. The effortless way they lied, to others, to themselves.”

— Joe Hill

297. “Lake Pontchartrain, huh?”

— Joe Hill

298. “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

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

— Joe Hill

300. “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