Top 450 Joe Hill Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “If you drive to the end of Little Harbor Road, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, it will take you to the ocean, but you won’t find the sandy lane to Camp Wyndham. I made the place up. Many other features of the area, however, are much as I presented them: South Street Cemetery, South Mill Pond, the Piscataqua Bridge. Here and there I have changed features to suit the needs of the story.”

— Joe Hill

352. “It was, I imagine, how bees feel. Not like an individual at all, but like one humming note in a whole world of perfect, useful music.”

— Joe Hill

353. “Left one for you, kiddo, he imagined the fat man telling him. Marshall’s skull grinned with small, sharp, slanting teeth. Might come in handy. You never know. In another couple days, when you’re too weak to stand, it might be just what the doctor ordered. Swallow one as needed for pain and call me never.”

— Joe Hill

354. “The enthusiasm, the swell of sweet courage he heard in her voice, filled him with Seattle-grunge levels of despair.”

— Joe Hill

355. “We’ll have to take it slow from here on out,” the Fireman said. He had that one wrong.”

— Joe Hill

356. “Written in faded blue letters, ornate, almost Gothic, across Gil’s chest, were two lines: It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself. – G. Greene.”

— Joe Hill

357. “Thank you, Maggie. For everything. For trying to warn me. For helping me. I’d give anything to take back the way I acted when I saw you in Haverhill. I was scared of you. That’s not an excuse. There isn’t any excuse. There’s a lot of things I wish I could redo. You can’t imagine. I wish there was something I could do to show you how sorry I am. Something I could give you besides words.”

— Joe Hill

358. “Maybe she had found everything the world had to offer her: a notion very like despair.”

— Joe Hill

359. “I hope you didn’t burn up, British Isles! Where would the world be without your epic contributions to culture: Duran Duran, Idris Elba, and Love Actually? Drop me an e-mail, England, let me know you’re still hanging in there!”

— Joe Hill

360. “Little novels aren’t leisurely, meandering journeys. They’re drag races. You put the pedal to the floor and run your narrative right off the edge of the cliff.”

— Joe Hill

361. “You want to be able to read such stories in just one or two sittings. You want them to feel like a hand on your throat.”

— Joe Hill

362. “Healthy American boobies, that’s what we’re fighting for,” he said. “That needs to be in the Constitution. Every man has a right to life, liberty, and germ-free titties. Learn the drill, girls. If we show up at your front door, be ready to do your patriotic duty and show us your freedom-loving, virus-free knockers.” The.”

— Joe Hill

363. “Neither disclosed these private discomforts. Each wanted the other to have the illusion that they might pause, anywhere, at any moment, and make love. And while both thought this was highly unlikely – not in this heat, not at this hour – the possibility kept bubbling up, every place they touched. This was the only true protection they’d brought with them as they walked deeper into the blue-gold Mojave.”

— Joe Hill

364. “The cicadas buzzed in Bing’s head, like madness.”

— Joe Hill

365. “The thing I’m hung up on is the idea of seeing something real. I don’t think most people feel half the things they pretend to feel.”

— Joe Hill

366. “He had despised that Mary with her idiot smile, symbol of a story that meant nothing, servant of a God who no good to anyone.”

— Joe Hill

367. “She, with her power to bring life into the world, was truly made in the image of the Creator, not man, and in all ways has proved Herself a more deserving object of man’s worship than Christ, that unshaven fanatic who lusted for the end of the world.”

— Joe Hill

368. “Harper’s face was buried in Mr. Truffle’s fur and with each inhalation she smelled the last nine months of his secret cat life: must, dust, grave dirt, basements and tall grass, beach and drainpipe, Dumpster and dandelions. The.”

— Joe Hill

369. “Still, she shoved herself to her feet, because she needed to do what she could, whether it made a difference or not.”

— Joe Hill

370. “The air was rank, and on my left, in a broad green meadow, arranged neatly in pairs, were dead lions and dead walruses and dead gazelles. It was like some horrible parade leading towards a cruel parody of Noah’s ark, a ship for everything that was gone and never coming back, everything that would not be saved.”

— Joe Hill

371. “Lady Gaga or Amanda Palmer or something. Some cute lunatic with a piano.”

— Joe Hill

372. “American productivity would, I believe, nearly double if everyone were free to work pantsless.”

— Joe Hill

373. “If ghosts have a color, then they are the color of an August thunderstorm getting ready to break.”

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

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

— Joe Hill

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

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

— Joe Hill

384. “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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

387. “It would be a librarian.”

— Joe Hill

388. “Terror was a fire that held you trapped in the top floor of a burning building; the only way to escape it was to jump.”

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

391. “An old flame,” Harper said.”

— Joe Hill

392. “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

393. “There have been six extinction events in the life of this planet. I bet every one of them was the spore.”

— Joe Hill

394. “Gold don’t come off. What’s good stays good, no matter how much of a beating it takes. You’re okay. You’ll always be okay.”

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

397. “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

398. “Eu ponho uma bola de gude na boca para me lembrar de ficar calado e escutar de vez em quando.”

— Joe Hill

399. “It’s a bigger pain in the ass than rectal cancer.”

— Joe Hill

400. “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