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Joe Hill Quotes

Total quotes: 41
“The best way to get even with anyone is to put them in the rearview mirror on your way to something better.”
— Joe Hill, Horns: A Novel
Tagged: Revenge, even, Past, Moving On, Letting Go, Examples of Metaphors
“You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know.”
— Joe Hill, Horns: A Novel
Tagged: Friendship, Marriage, Knowledge, Intimacy
“Was there any human urge more pitiful, or more intense, than wanting another chance at something?”
— Joe Hill, NOS4A2: A Novel
Tagged: humanity, urges, chances, Second Chances
“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, NOS4A2: A Novel
Tagged: Childhood, adults, Children, Imagination, resignation
“Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be kicked in the nuts as soon as they try to get back up. That wasn’t in the Bible, but maybe it should’ve been.”
— Joe Hill, Horns: A Novel
Tagged: Bible, Mourning, Blessed, God
“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, The Fireman: A Novel
Tagged: Murder, Torture, immoral, greater good
“There are no unselfish acts. When people do something for someone else, it’s always for their own personal psychological reasons.”
— Joe Hill, The Fireman: A Novel
Tagged: Selfish, help, kindness
“He'd possessed all the key elements of a school shooter: hormones, misery, ammunition. People wondered how something like Columbine could happen. Jude wondered why it didn't happen more often.”
— Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box
Tagged: Shootings, hormones, Misery, columbine
“My first wife was like the rash you get from poison ivy. I couldn't stand her, but I couldn't keep my hands off her. She was an itch I scratched until I bled.”
— Joe Hill, NOS4A2: A Novel
Tagged: Marriage, Wife, poison, bleeding
“You know someone for a while and then one day a hole opens underneath them, and they fall out of your world.”
— Joe Hill, 20th Century Ghosts
Tagged: Friendship, Dating, Breakups, Love
“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, 20th Century Ghosts
Tagged: Love, Judgement, Heaven, forgiven
“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, NOS4A2: A Novel
Tagged: hot girls, Mistakes, Love
“There’s the physical world... but there’s also our own private inner worlds, the world of our thoughts. A world made of ideas instead of stuff. It’s just as real as our world, but it’s inside.”
— Joe Hill, NOS4A2: A Novel
Tagged: Reality, worlds, Ideas
“Silence is the purest form of harmony. Everyone ought to try it. Put a stone in your mouth instead of a lie. Put a rock on your tongue instead of gossip.”
— Joe Hill, The Fireman: A Novel
Tagged: Silence, Lies, Gossip
“I felt like it needed some color down there, so I painted the walls with the motherfucker.”
— Joe Hill, NOS4A2: A Novel
Tagged: Blood, Death, creepy
“Don't ever have children, Tyler, unless you're ready to be afraid everyday for the rest of your life.”
— Joe Hill, Locke & Key Slipcase Set
Tagged: Children, Parenting, Fear
“When you think about it, most of the good ideas came along to make sin a whole lot easier.”
— Joe Hill, Horns: A Novel
Tagged: Sin, Ideas, inventions, Evil
“Everyone you lost was still there with you, and so maybe no one was ever lost at all.”
— Joe Hill, NOS4A2: A Novel
Tagged: Death, lost, Alone
“It was hard to venture back near the place you’d been bred without settling into the characteristics of the person you’d been there.”
— Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box
Tagged: Home, childhood home, Personality, reverting
“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, NOS4A2: A Novel
Tagged: Sanity, fragile, Fear
“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, NOS4A2: A Novel
Tagged: imaginary, Reality, Music, Fantasy
“He understood that the ghost existed first and foremost within his own head. That maybe ghosts always haunted minds, not places.”
— Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box
Tagged: Ghosts, Haunted, creepy
“When you think about it, most of the good ideas came along to make sin a whole lot easier.”
— Joe Hill, Horns: A Novel
Tagged: Sin, Evil
“Nurse Thorton dropped into the long-term-care ward a little before eight with a hot bag of blood for Charlie Manx.”
— Joe Hill, NOS4A2: A Novel
Tagged: first lines of books
“Taking a thing apart is always faster than putting something together. This is true of everything except marriage.”
— Joe Hill, 20th Century Ghosts
Tagged: Marriage, Divorce, Relationships, Love
“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, NOS4A2: A Novel
Tagged: Love, Happiness, Need, eating, breathing
“All the world is made of music. We are all strings on a lyre. We resonate. We sing together.”
— Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box
Tagged: Music, World, humanity, Singing
“I’ve always thought that when something really bad happens to a person, other people just have to know about it. You can’t be a tree falling in the woods with no one to hear you crash.”
— Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box
Tagged: Suffering, Gossip, Communication
“You know, we might’ve fucked up the planet, sucking out all the oil, melting the ice caps, allowing ska music to flourish, but we made Coca-Cola, so goddamn it, people weren’t all bad.”
— Joe Hill, The Fireman: A Novel
Tagged: inventions, Destruction, humanity
“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, Horns: A Novel
Tagged: Music, Feelings, emotions
“It’s so fucking cheap when people say I love you. It’s a name to stick on a surge of hormones, with a little hint of loyalty thrown in. I’ve never liked saying it. Here’s what I say: We’re together, now and until the end. You have everything I need to be happy. You make me feel right.”
— Joe Hill, The Fireman: A Novel
Tagged: I Love You, Love, hormones, Happiness
“Emotions are as real as gravity. Dreams are as powerful as history.”
— Joe Hill, NOS4A2: A Novel
Tagged: emotions, gravity, Dreams, History
“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-Shaped Box
Tagged: Life, Suffering, Pain
“There's something horribly unfair about dying in the middle of a good story, before you have a chance to see how it all comes out. Of course, I suppose everyone ALWAYS dies in the middle of a good story, in a sense. Your own story. Or the story of your grandchildren. Death is a raw deal for narrative junkies.”
— Joe Hill, The Fireman: A Novel
Tagged: Death, Dying, Stories
“I'm afraid I won't go to hell... that there isn't a hell to go to. No heaven either. Just nothing. Mostly I think there emus be nothing after we die. Sometimes that seems like it would be a relief. Other times it's the most awful thing I can imagine.”
— Joe Hill, Horns: A Novel
Tagged: Hell, Heaven, Death
“What a blessed if painful thing, this business of being alive.”
— Joe Hill, NOS4A2: A Novel
Tagged: Pain, Living, alive, Blessings
“Humanity is a germ that thrives on the very edge of catastrophe.”
— Joe Hill, The Fireman: A Novel
Tagged: humanity, germs, catastrophe
“Your personality is not just a matter of what you know about yourself, but what others know about you. You are one person with your mother, and another with your lover, and yet another with your child. Those other people create you--finish you--as much as you create you. When you're gone, the ones you've left behind get to keep the same part of you they always had.”
— Joe Hill, The Fireman: A Novel
Tagged: Friends, Family, Personality, Creation
“God loves man, we are told, but love must be proved by facts, not reasons. If you were in a boat and did not save a drowning man, you would burn in Hell for certain; yet God, in His wisdom, feels no need to use His power to save anyone from a single moment of suffering, and in spite of his inaction He is celebrated and revered.”
— Joe Hill, Horns: A Novel
Tagged: God, Love, Power, inaction
“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, Horns: A Novel
Tagged: God, Life, Suffering
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