Top 450 Joe Hill Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

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

— Joe Hill

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

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

— Joe Hill

410. “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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

413. “It would be a librarian.”

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

416. “An old flame,” Harper said.”

— Joe Hill

417. “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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

420. “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

421. “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

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

— Joe Hill

423. “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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

428. “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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

432. “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

433. “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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

436. “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

437. “Remember the stone in her fist.”

— Joe Hill

438. “She had all his savage powers of logic. It made a person feel naive and childish for imagining there could be any good in the world at all.”

— Joe Hill

439. “Was anything in the world more heartrending than being found out by someone you wanted to love you?”

— Joe Hill

440. “Men, she thought, were one of the world’s few sure comforts, like a fire on a cold October night, like cocoa, like broken-in slippers.”

— Joe Hill

441. “In a lot of ways, I guess Satan was the first superhero.”

— Joe Hill

442. “Right,” said the wolf. He said it “Ro-ight,” had a bit of a Liverpoolian accent. Liverpudlian, Saunders corrected himself mentally, randomly. No, Scouse. They called it Scouse, which sounded like a disease, something you might die from after being bitten by a wild animal.”

— Joe Hill

443. “It is odd how much we want to be in love when you think about how much anxiety comes with it, like a tax on money you won in the lottery.”

— Joe Hill

444. “The last note hung in the air like a snowflake that refused to fall.”

— Joe Hill

445. “The teenagers who had signed up to be Lookouts loved hustling in the cold, pretending they were marines on a black op. Most of them had been preparing for postapocalyptic stealth missions since they were old enough to pick up an Xbox controller. “Father.”

— Joe Hill

446. “Sounds could suggest shapes, painted a picture of the pocket of air in which they’d been given form.”

— Joe Hill

447. “In his mind he’s that guy in the cowboy hat from The Walking Dead, wiping out the zombies.”

— Joe Hill

448. “But other creatures of the desert do seem to apprehend what is happening. Through the crosshairs of its huge pupils, a tarantula watches Angie’s skin drink in the danger: the pollen from the Joshua mixes with the red blood on her finger. On a fuchsia ledge of limestone, a dozen lizards witness the Leap. They shut their gluey eyes as one, sealing their lucent bodies from contagion, inter-kingdom corruption.”

— Joe Hill

449. “Ever try not to think? It’s like trying not to breathe – no one can do it for long.”

— Joe Hill

450. “The Gasmask Man.”

— Joe Hill