Horns

50 Philosophical Joe Hill Quotes That Prove Talent Runs In Stephen King’s Family

Emotions are as real as gravity. Dreams are as powerful as history. 
Holly Riordan
August 17, 2016
“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
“Maybe all the schemes of the devil were nothing compared to what man could think up.”
— Joe Hill, Horns: A Novel
Tagged: devil, Evil, humanity, Destruction
“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, Destruction, Fixing
“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
“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
“What a blessed if painful thing, this business of being alive.”
— Joe Hill, NOS4A2: A Novel
Tagged: Pain, Living, alive, Blessings
“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
“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
“Innocence ain't all it's cracked up to be, you know. Innocent little kids rip the wings off flies, because they don't know any better. That's innocence.”
— Joe Hill, NOS4A2: A Novel
Tagged: Innocence, Childhood, Violence
“You can't let facts get in the way of the truth.”
— Joe Hill, NOS4A2: A Novel
Tagged: Facts, Truth, Lies
“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, Horns: A Novel
Tagged: Loved Ones, Good, Evil, Memories
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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.”
— Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box
Tagged: Mad, Demons, Impulse, Insanity
“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, Heart-Shaped Box
Tagged: Drunk, stoned, healthy
“If hell was anything, it was talk radio — and family.”
— Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box
Tagged: Family, Hell, radio, Torture
“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, Heart-Shaped Box
Tagged: Ghosts, minds, Haunted, Suicide
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“Someone probably a lot smarter than me said hell is other people. I say you’re in hell when you don’t give to someone who needs, because you can’t bear to have less. What you are giving away then is your own soul.”
— Joe Hill, The Fireman: A Novel
Tagged: Giving, Souls, Hell
“It’s easy to dismiss religion as bloody, cruel, and tribal. I’ve done it myself. But it isn’t religion that’s wired that way – it’s man himself. At bottom every faith is a form of instruction in common decency. Different textbooks in the same class. Don’t they all teach that to do for others feels better than to do for yourself? That someone else’s happiness need not mean less happiness for you?”
— Joe Hill, The Fireman: A Novel
Tagged: Religion, Violence, Faith, Happiness
“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
“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