Joe Hill famous quotes

I mean, when the world comes for your children, with the knives out, it's your job to stand in the way.
-- Joe Hill

#Jobs #Children #Mean

All the world is made of music. We are all strings on a lyre. We resonate. We sing together.
-- Joe Hill

#Life #Together #World

... people made the imaginary real all the time: taking the music they heard in their head and recording it, seeing a house in their imagination and building it. Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.
-- Joe Hill

#Real #Imagination #People

The best way to get even with anyone is to put them in the rearview mirror on your way to something better.
-- Joe Hill

#Mirrors #Way #Rearview Mirror

Was there any human urge more pitiful-or more intense- than wanting another chance at something?
-- Joe Hill

#Another Chance #Chance #Intense

Music [is] the third rail of life. You grabbed it to shock yourself out of the dull drag of hours. To feel something. To burn with all the emotions you didn't get to experience in the ordinary run of school, TV, and loading the dishwasher after dinner.
-- Joe Hill

#Running #School #Dull

I want you to remember what was good in me, not what was most awful. The people you love should be allowed to keep their worst to themselves.
-- Joe Hill

#People #Want #Awful

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

#Powerful #Adventure #Snakes

I remember an era when you could get your nose sliced off for sticking it too far into another man's business. Now you can find out anything about anyone with the click of a button. There is no privacy and no consideration, and everyone is prying into things that aren't their affair. You can probably check on the intertube and find out what color underwear I have on today.
-- Joe Hill

#Men #Color #Today

You know someone for a while and then one day a hole opens underneath them, and they fall out of your world.
-- Joe Hill

#Fall #One Day #World

He understood that the ghost existed first and foremost within his own head. That maybe ghosts always haunted minds, not places. If he wanted to take a shot at it, he’d have to turn the barrel against his own temple.
-- Joe Hill

#Mind #Firsts #Temples

Don't believe everything you hear today
-- Joe Hill

#Believe #Today

She liked things that had been written by people who had lived short, ugly, and tragic lives. Or, who at least, were English.
-- Joe Hill

#People #Ugly #Tragic

The difference between childhood and adulthood, Vic had come to believe, was the difference between imagination and resignation. You traded one for the other and lost your way.
-- Joe Hill

#Believe #Differences #Imagination

It's like in the Bible.You can't always get what you want, but if you really need something, you usually find it." "What part of the Bible is that from?" Ig asked her. "The Gospel of Keith Richards?
-- Joe Hill

#Needs #Keith #Want

I hope if there is another world, we will not be judged too harshly for the things we did wrong here—that we will at least be forgiven for the mistakes we made out of love.
-- Joe Hill

#Mistake #World #Made

The blood of a redheaded woman is three degrees cooler than the blood of a normal woman. This has been established by medical studies.
-- Joe Hill

#Blood #Degrees #Three

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. Their clumsy affections, their bristly faces, and their willingness to do what needed to be done - cook an omelette, change lightbulbs, make with hugging - sometimes almost made being a woman fun.
-- Joe Hill

#Fun #Night #Men

You can't let facts get in the way of the truth.
-- Joe Hill

#Way #Facts

To be honest, I think cell phones were invented by the devil.
-- Joe Hill

#Thinking #Phones #Cells

She just knew that even when you had nothing, you still had love.
-- Joe Hill

#Stills

Sooner or later a black car came for everyone.
-- Joe Hill

#Car #Black #Sooner Or Later

What a blessed if painful thing, this business of being alive.
-- Joe Hill

#Blessed #Alive #Painful

Gold don't come off. What's good stays good no matter how much of a beating it takes.
-- Joe Hill

#Gold #Matter

She'd thought love had something to do with happiness, but it turned out they were not even vaguely related. Love was closer to a need, no different from the need to eat, to breathe.
-- Joe Hill

#Different #Needs #Breathe

I felt like it needed some color down there, so I painted the walls with the motherfucker.
-- Joe Hill

#Wall #Color #Needed

She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.
-- Joe Hill

#Sweet #Book #Snacks

That was one thing you found out when you were stoned, or wasted, or feverish: that the world was always turning and that only a healthy mind could block out the sickening whirl of it.
-- Joe Hill

#Block #Healthy #Mind

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.
-- Joe Hill

#Character #Thinking #Narrative

When you think about it, most of the good ideas came along to make sin a whole lot easier.
-- Joe Hill

#Thinking #Ideas #Sin

I will die like a true-blue rebel. Don't waste any time in mourning - organize.
-- Joe Hill

#Blue #Mourning #Political

Taking a thing apart is always faster than putting something together. This is true of everything except marriage.
-- Joe Hill

#Together #Faster

Who knows what may lie around the next corner? There may be a window somewhere ahead. It may look out on a field of sunflowers.
-- Joe Hill

#Lying #Sunflower #Looks

You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know.
-- Joe Hill

#Thinking #Want #What You Want

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

#Philosophical #Exercise #Evil

Some things you didn't give away, no matter how much you owed.
-- Joe Hill

#Giving #Matter

It was something... the way a person's life picked up speed, the way a life was like a bullet aimed at one final target, impossible to slow or turn aside, and like the bullet, you were ignorant of what you were going to hit, would never know anything except the rush and the impact.
-- Joe Hill

#Impact #Ignorant #Bullets

Don't ever have children, Tyler, unless you're ready to be afraid everyday for the rest of your life.
-- Joe Hill

#Children #Everyday #Ready

He had tried to explain the way he felt to Danny once, about compulsive behavior and time rushing too fast and the Internet and drugs. Danny had only lifted one of his slender, mobile eyebrows and stared at him in smirking confusion. Danny did not think coke and computers were anything alike. But Jude had seen the way people hunched over their screens, clicking the refresh button again and again, waiting for some crucial if meaningless hit of information, and he thought it was almost exactly the same.
-- Joe Hill

#Thinking #Rushing #Eyebrows

Horror was rooted in sympathy . . . in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst.
-- Joe Hill

#Understanding #Suffering #Would Be

I didn't know the inner me was hungry," I said to Art. "That's because it already starved to death.
-- Joe Hill

#Art #Hungry #Said

The mad sometimes drilled holes in their own heads to let the demons out. To relieve the pressure of thoughts they could no longer bear. Jude understood the impulse. Each beat of his heart was a fresh and staggering blow felt in the nerves behind his eyes and in his temples. Punishing evidence of life.
-- Joe Hill

#Heart #Eye #Blow

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

#Soul #Devil #Would Be

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

#Fire #Rakes #Coal

It bewildered Ig, the idea that a person could not be interested in music. It was like not being interested in happiness.
-- Joe Hill

#Ideas #Persons

I am; I was. I want to be.
-- Joe Hill

#Want

Maybe all the schemes of the devil were nothing compared to what man could think up.
-- Joe Hill

#Men #Thinking #Devil

Love requires Context.
-- Joe Hill

But God fears women even more that He fears the devil- and is right to. She, with her power to bring life into the world, was truly made in the image of the Creator, not man.
-- Joe Hill

#Men #Devil #World

The soul may not be destroyed. The soul goes on forever. Like the number pi, it is without cessation or conclusion. Like pi it is a constant. Pi is an irrational number, incapable of being made into a fraction, impossible to divide from itself. So, too, the soul is an irrational, indivisible equation that perfectly expresses one thing: you.
-- Joe Hill

#Numbers #Forever #Soul

The language of sin was universal, the original Esperanto.
-- Joe Hill

#Esperanto #Language #Sin

I liked AC/DC," Lee said. "If you were going to shoot someone, you'd really want to do it while you were listening to them." "What about the Beatles? Did you feel like shooting anyone listening to them?" Lee considered seriously for a moment, then said, "Myself." At the same time he was laughing, Ig was distressed. Not liking the Beatles was almost as bad as not knowing about them at all.
-- Joe Hill

#Knowing #Laughing #Listening

He paused, twisting his goatee, considering the law in Deuteronomy that forbade clothes with mixed fibers. A problematic bit of Scripture. A matter that required thought. "Only the devil wants man to have a wide range of lightweight and comfortable styles to choose from," he murmured at last, trying out a new proverb. "Although there may be no forgiveness for polyester. On this one matter, Satan and the Lord are in agreement.
-- Joe Hill

#Men #Clothes #Law

God saves - but not now, and not here. His salvation is on layaway. Like all grifters, He asks you to pay now and take it on faith that you will receive later. Whereas 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, frequently to those who deserve it least. So it was in my case. So it is for many. The devil and woman have been allies against God from the beginning...
-- Joe Hill

#Devil #Allies #Different

I will be waiting by candlelight in our tree house of the mind.
-- Joe Hill

#House #Tree #Waiting

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

#Girl #Mistake #Thinking

Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.
-- Joe Hill

#Reality #Waiting #Fantasy

And he paddled away in his douche canoe.
-- Joe Hill

#Douches

You loved me as hard as you knew how. I'd give anything to go back and love you better...
-- Joe Hill

#Love You #Giving #And Love

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

#Children #Believe #Differences

Well. That's helpful. We'll put an APB out on the Gingerbread Man. I'm not hopeful it'll do us much good, though. Word on the street is you can't catch him.
-- Joe Hill

#Men #Hopeful #Gingerbread