Top 100 Joe Hill Quotes
#1. Him and God are supposed to be at war with each other. But if God hates sin and Satan punishes the sinners, aren't they working the same side of the street? Aren't the judge and the executioner on the same team?
Joe Hill
#2. There's always a little decency in the worst places ... and always a little secret selfishness in the best.
Joe Hill
#3. Hey! I get to sleep in a library and read books all night! Without pity, where would I be? I'm a total pity s-s-ssslut.
Joe Hill
#4. Pick a sin we can both live with, is what I ask.
Joe Hill
#5. That's it? 'Damn, it smells like the fishsticks are burning and don't do that with your head, Bode?' What the fuck?
Joe Hill
#6. Hutter thought, not for the first time, that she hated a lot of cops. Ugly, mean drunks who believed the worst of everyone.
Joe Hill
#7. With the cross around his neck he could be his old self again, he could have it all back if he wanted it, but it wasn't worth having. If you were going to live in hell on earth, there was something to be said for being one of the devils. - Horns p.381
Joe Hill
#8. You won't do anyone any good if you drop dead of exhaustion," she said to Harper once. I won't do anyone any good if I don't, Harper imagined saying back. I'm not doing anyone any good, one way or another. But she didn't say it. It would've been grief talking, and it was unfair to unload her sadness
Joe Hill
#9. Was there any human urge more pitiful-or more intense- than wanting another chance at something?
Joe Hill
#10. If books were girls and reading was s-ss-ssss-fucking, this would be the biggest whorehouse in the county and I'd be the most ruthless pimp you ever met. Whap the girls on the butts and send them off to their tricks as fast and often as I can.
Joe Hill
#11. Lindy became an instructor at an upscale gym, where she taught aerobic pole dancing
Joe Hill
#12. A little north of Boston, there was something called LOVECRAFT KEYHOLE; it was a crater in the rough shape of a padlock.
Joe Hill
#13. It's about the terror of an ordinary life" or "It's the story of a man shipwrecked in his own mind." But
Joe Hill
#14. It'll always bother you, wondering what you missed out on," Merrin said now. "That's how men are. I'm just being practical. I'm not waiting to get married to you so I can fight through your midlife affair with our babysitter. I'm not going to be the reason for your regrets.
Joe Hill
#15. No. I don't think so. It isn't about whether I die. It's about figuring out where. And I've decided. I'm going to see how high I can go. I want to see if it's true. If the sky opens up at the top.
Joe Hill
#16. Do you spend a lot of nights keeping the fire department in hysterics with creative acts of arson?" "Everyone needs a hobby," he said. Then
Joe Hill
#17. LIBRARIES: WHERE SHHH HAPPENS.
Joe Hill
#18. It tastes better than a rock." Allie tossed back the quarter inch Harper had given her in a single swallow, then made a face. "Oh, God. No it doesn't. This is piss. Like drinking gasoline after someone stirred it with a Butterfinger. Or like a banana smoothie that went rotten. Horrible." "You
Joe Hill
#19. The truth is always more scary than kissing someone for the first time.
Joe Hill
#20. It'd be a mistake," Lee said. "I think maybe you have to make a few," Merrin said. "If you don't, you're probably thinking too much. That's the worst mistake you can make.
Joe Hill
#21. Something that doesn't know it's alive obviously can't be expected to know when it's dead.
Joe Hill
#22. He had no doubt that Merrin had called out to God here in this place while she was been raped and killed, in her heart if not with her voice. God's reply had been that due to the high volume of calls she could expect to be on hold until she was dead.
Joe Hill
#23. I have nothing to say for myself, only that I have always tried to make this earth a little bit better
Joe Hill
#24. I'm sorry to bother you," she whispered. "When I get excited about a movie I want to talk. I can't help it.
Joe Hill
#25. Yeah. Ideally I'd like to see us leave a swath of destruction that can be seen from orbit. Barring that, let's at least try to destroy something precious and beautiful that can never be replaced,
Joe Hill
#26. he sees a place where he will passively fade away, like wallpaper that gets too much sunlight and slowly loses its color. This
Joe Hill
#27. I'm a Browncoat, man." "More like turncoat," Daltry said, and laughed. Flecks of spittle hit Bilbo in the face.
Joe Hill
#28. Already, though, she understood the difference between being a child and being an adult. The difference is when someone says he can keep the bad things away, a child believes him.
Joe Hill
#29. The road to Christmasland is paved in dreams!
Joe Hill
#30. Sometimes it seemed to him he was allergic to expressing himself. Often, when he desperately wanted to say a thing, he could actually feel his windpipe closing up on him, cutting off his air.
Joe Hill
#31. That is the most wonderful sentence I have ever heard. I want that on my gravestone. Snuffleupagus was real. No more. Just that. Harper
Joe Hill
#32. It was Hooper. The big, pale dog stared urgently into Wayne's face, forepaws on the bed. His damp gaze was unhappy, even stricken.
Joe Hill
#33. Horror was rooted in sympathy ... in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst.
Joe Hill
#34. Charles Talent Manx the Third at your service, my dear! CEO of Christmasland Enterprises, director of Christmasland Entertainment, president of fun! Also His Eminence, the King Shit of Turd Hill, although it doesn't say that on my card.
Joe Hill
#35. Scientists never study the important things. Like why some animals seem to have evolved the ability to gloat.
Joe Hill
#36. In her experience it was very difficult to offer a man affection and kindness without giving him the impression you were also offering a lay.
Joe Hill
#37. She didn't like to feel things so intensely. It reminded her of being crazy.
Joe Hill
#38. How's that? Do I look like Errol Flynn?" "You are a dashing motherfucker," she told him. She
Joe Hill
#39. The people in charge can always justify doing terrible things in the name of the greater good. A slaughter here, a little torture there. It becomes moral to do things that would be immoral if an ordinary individual did 'em.
Joe Hill
#40. She's talking about cutting a bitch. She'd
Joe Hill
#41. He believed in his own decency with all his heart. So it was with every true monster, Vic supposed.
Joe Hill
#42. When you think about it, most of the good ideas came along to make sin a whole lot easier.
Joe Hill
#43. In this world, family is the final, most elemental unit of power. A small group, helplessly bound together by blood with a shared set of skills and tools for consolidating power and subjugating others.
Joe Hill
#44. When he smiled, she saw that his mouth was full of little hooks, rows of them, each as small and delicate as a sewing needle.
Joe Hill
#45. He had won it as a child, playing Scriptural Jeopardy in his Sunday-school class. When faced with answers from the Bible, Ig had all the right questions.
Joe Hill
#46. FOX said the Dragon had been set loose by ISIS, using spores that had been invented by the Russians in the 1980s. MSNBC said sources indicated the 'scale might've been created by engineers at Halliburton and stolen by culty Christian types fixated on the Book of Revelation. CNN reported both sides.
Joe Hill
#47. He searched the ground floor and found only shadow and stillness, which should've reassured him but didn't. It was the wrong kind of stillness, the shocked stillness that follows the bang of a cherry bomb. His eardrums throbbed from the pressure of all that quiet, a dreadful silence.
Joe Hill
#48. Women offer a different sort of salvation, more immediate and fulfilling. They don't put off their love for a distant, ill-defined eternity but make a gift of it in the here and now.
Joe Hill
#49. You want sympathy, go fuck James Taylor.
Joe Hill
#50. 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
#51. You sure you're all right? You aren't out here pondering dark female thoughts are you?
Joe Hill
#52. I mean, when the world comes for your children, with the knives out, it's your job to stand in the way.
Joe Hill
#53. Sometimes it seemed that one of the stars came loose from the firmament and sailed off with dizzying speed to a far corner of the night. In the dark hours before sunrise, constellations came apart and reformed and fell in burning streaks.
Joe Hill
#54. Aren't you going to tell me I'm not so bad? she asked.
Mmm-no. I was thinking how every man loves a hot girl with a history of making mistakes. Because it's always possible she'll make one with you.
Joe Hill
#55. Ha ha," he told her. "I get it. Very funny. Everyone loves a good deaf joke. Hey, why did God make farts stink? So deaf people could enjoy them, too." When
Joe Hill
#56. If you didn't have me to rake you over the coals now and then, there wouldn't be any fire in your life at all.
Joe Hill
#57. That night Lee suffered overheated, sexually complicated dreams; he dreamed that Merrin was naked in his bed, and he sat on top of her arms and held her down while he forced a funnel into her mouth, a red plastic funnel, and then poured gasoline into it, and she began to buck under him as in orgasm.
Joe Hill
#58. The sky was the color of a migraine.
Joe Hill
#60. Vic stared at her, incredulous. "What do you mean you don't know why?" Vic asked her. "He isn't coming home because of you, Mom. Because he can't stand you. Because all you ever do is bitch at him, stand there and bitch when he's tired and wants to be left alone.
Joe Hill
#61. He took off," Bilbo said. "Like you said he would. Caught a cab outside the lobby." "You get the cab number?" "And the license," Bilbo said, and told him both.
Joe Hill
#62. So much of what was best in life went unnoticed in the moments you had it.
Joe Hill
#63. Why am I not good at anything?"
"You're a good dad."
"It ain't rocket science."
No, Vic thought. It was harder.
Joe Hill
#64. The whole world can burn down around us. I'll keep my arms around you until the end.
Joe Hill
#65. 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
#66. Kids always think they're coming into a story at the beginning, when usually they're coming in at the end.
Joe Hill
#67. People have pretty rubbery brains. They can take quite a bit of bouncing around. Come on. Band-Aids and tea. And answers. They're all right this way.
Joe Hill
#68. There was no such thing as arguing with delight. Like seeing a pretty girl with the sunlight in her hair, like pancakes and hot chocolate in front of a crackling fire. Delight was one of the fundamental forces of being, like gravity.
Joe Hill
#69. With its towering smokestack, it looked like a factory built to produce nightmares in mass quantities.
Joe Hill
#70. The dead win when you quit singing and let them take you on down the road with them.
Joe Hill
#71. I remind myself that no one day of writing matters all that much. A story is built somewhat like a stalactite - one little drip of mud and grit at a time.
Joe Hill
#72. 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
#73. Social media is teaching us that everyone fucks up, everyone is stupid sometimes, and that this is probably part of being a thinking human. The one exception are those who participate in the self-righteousness Olympics and they often turn people who agree with them against 'em.
Joe Hill
#74. They came to believe their doctors were holding back limited quantities of a cure, and attempted to take them hostage. They formed armies, congresses, religions; plotted rebellions, fomented treasons, practiced heresies.
Joe Hill
#75. The beard was actually less Dumbledore, more Hemingway, but the eyes behind the lenses of his glasses were a brilliant shade of blue that naturally suggested a man who could cast runes and speak to trees. Harper
Joe Hill
#76. You know about women who work in bars." "What about them?" Bing asked. "Whores," Manx said. "Almost all of them. At least until their looks go, and in the case of Lily Carter's mother they're going fast.
Joe Hill
#77. She just knew that even when you had nothing, you still had love.
Joe Hill
#78. The problem with role models is they teach you roles.
Joe Hill
#79. The soul is an irrational, indivisible equation that perfectly expresses one thing: you. The soul would be no good to the devil if it could be destroyed. And it is not lost when placed in Satan's care, as is so often said. He always know exactly how to put his finger on it.
Joe Hill
#80. The girl worked the clutch and the gas and the brake expertly with her right foot, just as her father had taught her.
Joe Hill
#81. Oh, now don't act like the idea is so terrible. When you come down to it, what could be more romantic than a few hours of scrambling around in a cold, dripping hole known for occasionally flooding and drowning people?
Joe Hill
#82. The aspiring novelist in me wants a secret tunnel hidden behind a false wall, or a poster of a famous movie star, or
Joe Hill
#83. Terror is the desire to save your own ass, but horror is rooted in sympathy.
Joe Hill
#84. I don't know, maybe you'd be more interested in me if I were a book.
Joe Hill
#85. Still, she shoved herself to her feet, because she needed to do what she could, whether it made a difference or not.
Joe Hill
#86. 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
#87. Her sanity was a fragile thing, a butterfly cupped in her hands, that she carried with her everywhere, afraid of what would happen if she let it go - or got careless and crushed it.
Joe Hill
#88. Max almost needed it to be true, for vampires to be real, because the other possibility- that their father was, and always had been, in the grip of a psychotic fantasy- was too awful, too overwhelming.
Joe Hill
#89. If hell was anything, it was talk radio - and family.
Joe Hill
#90. I guess Satan was the first superhero [ ... ] 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
#91. 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
#92. She was saying he wasn't like the children in Christmasland. She was saying he was still himself. But Charlie Manx had said something different. Charlie Manx said blood didn't come out of silk. Tabitha
Joe Hill
#93. The fires of hell are not hot enough for a man - or woman! - who would hurt his children.
Joe Hill
#94. Ma'am," Cline said, "I hid under dead bodies less cold than you." He glanced at Harper and
Joe Hill
#95. Maybe all the schemes of the devil were nothing compared to what man could think up.
Joe Hill
#96. Sooner or later a black car came for everyone.
Joe Hill
#97. Prison didn't frighten him especially. He had a lot of fans in there.
Joe Hill
#98. You could just tell she was the best kind of trouble.
Joe Hill
#99. Terry was cool, cooler then Ig would ever be, but he was afraid. His fear narrowed his vision so that he couldn't see anything except what he stood to lose.
Joe Hill
#100. It was like wondering how evil had come into the world or what happens to a person after he dies: an interesting philosophical exercise, but also curiously pointless, since evil and death happened, regardless of the why and the how and what-it-meant.
Joe Hill
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