Top 450 Joe Hill Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “The author is unworthy of His own characters. The devil is first a literary critic, who delivers this untalented scribbler the public flaying He deserves.”

— Joe Hill

352. “Harper thought of Hillary Clinton. She.”

— Joe Hill

353. “But they could not stay, because you could not raise a baby in a trench.”

— Joe Hill

354. “Nah. Hero, for sure. Think about it. In his first adventure, he took the form of a snake to free two prisoners being held naked in a Third World jungle prison by an all-powerful megalomaniac. At the same time, he broadened their diet and introduced them to their own sexuality.”

— Joe Hill

355. “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.”

— Joe Hill

356. “He glanced over at the woman who had never been his wife but who had, incredibly, given him a child and made his life mean something. The idea that he had ever held her hand, or tasted her mouth, or made love to her, even now seemed as unlikely as being bitten by a radioactive spider.”

— Joe Hill

357. “In the West you will find men like that, fellows with gentle hands and hard, flat voices. Horses and dogs are instinctively loyal to such fellows, while yellowbellies and equivocators instinctively fear them. They make mediocre husbands, good officers of the law, and top-notch bank robbers.”

— Joe Hill

358. “Falling in love in high school is like thinking you can fly a 747 because you know how to fly a kite.”

— Joe Hill

359. “Any pattern repeated over and over is bound to turn into wallpaper eventually, whether it’s flowers or corpses.”

— Joe Hill

360. “Time to pour a glass of strawberry Quik – Mr. Beukes liked to use it as an ingredient in his protein shakes, and I liked to use it as an ingredient in my fat ass –.”

— Joe Hill

361. “All good preachers have a little of the devil in them.”

— Joe Hill

362. “You sure you’re all right? You aren’t out here pondering dark female thoughts are you?”

— Joe Hill

363. “If he took you camping after he died, my boy, then you would have a story to tell!”

— Joe Hill

364. “At first glance Bing knew that although this man might have passed for forty or so, he was much older than that. His eyes had the soft, faded look of sea glass; they were old eyes, unfathomably old. He had a long, harrowed face, wise and kindly, although he had an overbite and his teeth were a little crooked. It was the sort of face, Bing supposed, that some people would describe as ferretlike, but in profile it also would’ve looked just fine on currency.”

— Joe Hill

365. “Oh, yeah,” my dad said. “Check out Such Men Are Dangerous, the novel Block wrote as Paul Kavanagh. That book is less like a novel, more like getting mugged in an alley.” Such Men Are Dangerous was the story of an ex-soldier who had done ugly things in the war and come home looking to do some ugly things right here. While it has been decades since I read it, I think my dad’s assessment was roughly correct.”

— Joe Hill

366. “They’re not bad people, most of them. All they want is to be safe.” “Isn’t that always a permission slip for ugliness and cruelty? All they want is to be safe, and they don’t care who they have to destroy to stay that way. And.”

— Joe Hill

367. “It was even softer and fluffier than I’d imagined. It was like wearing an Ewok.”

— Joe Hill

368. “Miriam sang, “Gail, Gail, she bosses everyone around. Gail, Gail, she is really stupid.” The melody was just as good as the lyrics.”

— Joe Hill

369. “The Naughty List – People who skim or outright skip acknowledgments pages. Please contact the management for your free, all-expenses-paid pass to Christmasland.”

— Joe Hill

370. “Dire?” the girl asks. And learns from the ranger that the Joshua trees may be on the brink of extinction. Botanists believe they are witnessing a coordinated response to crisis. Perhaps a drought, legible in the plants’ purplish leaves, has resulted in this push. Seeds in abundance. The ancient species’ Hail Mary pass. Yucca moths, attracted by the flowers’ penetrating odor, are their heroic spouses, equally dependent, equally endangered; their larval children feast on yucca seeds.”

— Joe Hill

371. “The universe had settled into the business of taking things away from him: the baby, his simple married happiness, the sensual enjoyment he took from the smell of pines.”

— Joe Hill

372. “This is the way people dream of being kissed, a movie star kiss.”

— Joe Hill

373. “What he’d thought of as a personal strength – he was happy to know about her only what she wanted him to know – was something more like selfishness. A childish willingness to remain in the dark, to avoid distressing conversations, upsetting truths. He had feared her secrets – or, more specifically, the emotional entanglements that might come with knowing them.”

— Joe Hill

374. “I’d rather ask questions,” she said, “than answer them.”

— Joe Hill

375. “You knew what was real not by its qualities but by its imperfections.”

— Joe Hill

376. “It would be a librarian.”

— Joe Hill

377. “He watched until Danny passed through the gates, turned left, and disappeared from sight. Jude never saw him again.”

— Joe Hill

378. “Not that they were married. They never would’ve married. All firemen are wedded to cinders, in the end.”

— Joe Hill

379. “An old flame,” Harper said.”

— Joe Hill

380. “She wished she were not so aware of the vast gulf between what the men in her life thought she was worth and her actual value. She had, it seemed to her, always asked and expected too much and given too little. 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

381. “It was the end of the world, but you could still hit the drive-thru on your way to oblivion.”

— Joe Hill

382. “I was so scared of doing the wrong thing I hardly ever did the right thing.” Vic.”

— Joe Hill

383. “They are both silent, doubt and grief and fury scuttling between them like beetles in search of a meal. Tetsuo and the girl stare at each other with such deep familiarity that Key feels forgotten, alone – almost ashamed of the dreams that have kept her alive for a decade. They have never felt so hopeless, or so false. “Her name is Key,” Tetsuo says, in something like defeat. He turns away, though he makes no move to leave. “She will be your new caretaker.”

— Joe Hill

384. “In stories told later, many boys would claim that the girls on Coffin Rock were decorated with chunks of raw turkey, soaked in poultry blood like the chick in fuckin’ Carrie, but this was embellishment.”

— Joe Hill

385. “In the distance, she could hear the congregation roaring the Talking Heads, bellowing about the sweet release of burning it all down.”

— Joe Hill

386. “He felt he was being swept away, not just from his life but from God, the idea of God, or hope, or reason, the idea that things made sense, that cause followed effect, and it ought not to be like this, Ig felt, death ought not to be like this, even for sinners. He.”

— Joe Hill

387. “Come! All ye faithful! Jiggy and triii-umphant! Come all ye faithful, sing yay for the Lord!”

— Joe Hill

388. “Although nothing keeps a person youthful like happiness. Innocent fun is as good as pickling a fellow!”

— Joe Hill

389. “Happiness will do more for you than any wonder drug the apothecaries can invent!”

— Joe Hill

390. “Without understanding exactly how the trap got sprung, he can feel its teeth in him.”

— Joe Hill

391. “I say you’re in hell when you don’t give to someone who needs, because you can’t bear to have less.”

— Joe Hill

392. “At the end, I get to be the person I always wanted to be,” she thought.”

— Joe Hill

393. “It tasted of the oak cask and sweet annihilation.”

— Joe Hill

394. “Wayne was certain dogs were as superstitious as humans. More, maybe.”

— Joe Hill

395. “She wasn’t sure good intentions always paved the road to hell, but they for sure weren’t the highest standard of medical care. She.”

— Joe Hill

396. “Time must be slowed to a crawl to make sense of any scene of true chaos – to show the flurry of human action and reaction going off like multiple strings of firecrackers, all at once. Every.”

— Joe Hill

397. “Nor had he wanted to get right with God; he felt that God needed to get right with him.”

— Joe Hill

398. “In the library the dead meet the living on collegial terms as a matter of course, every day.”

— Joe Hill

399. “I’ve already visited the lost and lonely place at the end of the world, and all I know is, the only way to keep going is to do the things the people you loved would’ve wanted you to do.”

— Joe Hill

400. “Remember the stone in her fist.”

— Joe Hill