Top 450 Joe Hill Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Because, of course, it wouldn’t do to just talk to her. She had spoken to him in flashes of daylight, and he felt he ought to reply in kind.”

— Joe Hill

402. “Every breath I take fills my throat with the infants of a thousand sea creatures, filtered by the bioscreens installed by the clever men who made me what I am today. I am not a baleen whale, but the krill and larvae I catch and keep in this manner will help to replace the calories my body burns to keep me warm this far below the sea.”

— Joe Hill

403. “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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

406. “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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

409. “They glowed in the darkness, all of them: pale shining wisps with rings of light where their eyes belonged, as if they were the dead – ghosts risen from their graves – not Gilbert Cline. Harper felt their grief as a slow current of cold water, and herself as a leaf revolving upon it. As.”

— Joe Hill

410. “She was being erased a little at a time by a cancer that fed not on her flesh but on her inner life, on her private store of happiness.”

— Joe Hill

411. “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

412. “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

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

— Joe Hill

414. “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

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

418. “Later, she thought, not imagining that there wouldn’t be a later. Not for Father Storey.”

— Joe Hill

419. “Ma’am,” Cline said, “I hid under dead bodies less cold than you.” He glanced at Harper and.”

— Joe Hill

420. “She said, “I love you, Con,” because whatever Jakob believed about those three words, they still mattered to Harper. They were as close to an incantation as any she knew, had power other words lacked. “I’ll.”

— Joe Hill

421. “Why don’t you hit Ig?” Terry whispered. “He’s the one checking out little redheads. Thinking lustful thoughts. He’s coveting. Look at him. You can see it on his face. Look at that coveting expression.” “Covetous,” Derrick said.”

— Joe Hill

422. “I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman’s power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. 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

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

— Joe Hill

424. “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

425. “They made their unsteady way up onto damp, firm sand, through the cool wet.”

— Joe Hill

426. “All it took to turn a CD into a knife or a tape gun into a .45 was a little imagination, a little panic, and a lot of prejudice.”

— Joe Hill

427. “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

428. “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

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

— Joe Hill

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

433. “Repulsion masks attraction.”

— Joe Hill

434. “Ozzy Osbourne has Pomeranians,” the UPS guy said. “I saw them on TV. Cute little dogs like house cats. You ever think about getting a couple cute little dogs like that?”

— Joe Hill

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

— Joe Hill

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “And at last Lee said, “What are those goddamn things on your head?” He sounded genuinely surprised. “Jesus, Ig. Are those horns?”

— Joe Hill

441. “The road will make me better. The road always does.”

— Joe Hill

442. “A book of stories isn’t a novel and can’t have the simple narrative drive of a novel. I think it should still try to have a feeling of progression, of connectedness. It’s like a road trip. You’re staying in a different inn every night:.”

— Joe Hill

443. “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

444. “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

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

— Joe Hill

446. “To weep was a kind of luxury; the dead felt no loss, wept for no one and nothing.”

— Joe Hill

447. “You found yourself a librarian! I can help with the figuring-out thing and point you toward some good poetry while I’m at it. It’s what I do.”

— Joe Hill

448. “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

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

— Joe Hill

450. “Writers were as parasitic, she supposed, as the spore itself.”

— Joe Hill