Joe Hill > Quotes

“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

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

“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, 20th Century Ghosts

“You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know.”
― Joe Hill, Horns

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

“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, Heart-Shaped Box

“You want sympathy, go fuck James Taylor.”
― Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box

“Don't ever have children, Tyler, unless you're ready to be afraid everyday for the rest of your life.”
― Joe Hill, Locke and Key, Vol. 3: Crown of Shadows

“Why is there evil in the world? Because sometimes you just wanna fuckin have it, and you don’t care who gets hurt.”
― Joe Hill

“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, Horns

“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, Horns

“I didn't know the inner me was hungry," I said to Art.
"That's because it already starved to death. ”
― Joe Hill, 20th Century Ghosts

“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, Horns

“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

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

“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

“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, Horns

“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, Horns

“All the world is made of music. We are all strings on a lyre. We resonate. We sing together.”
― Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box

“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, Horns

“Terror is the desire to save your own ass, but horror is rooted in sympathy.”
― Joe Hill

“Maybe all the schemes of the devil were nothing compared to what man could think up.”
― Joe Hill, Horns

“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

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

“Some things you didn't give away, no matter how much you owed.”
― Joe Hill, Horns

“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, Heart-Shaped Box

“The language of sin was universal, the original Esperanto.”
― Joe Hill, Horns

“Love requires Context.”
― Joe Hill, Horns

“I am; I was. I want to be.”
― Joe Hill, Horns

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

“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

“Don't waste time mourning. Organize”
― Joe Hill

“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

“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

“If hell was anything, it was talk radio — and family.”
― Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box

“I miss you, Jude. I'm looking forward to putting my arms around you. We're going to sing just like the old days. Everyone sings here. After a while it kind of sounds like screaming. Just listen. Listen and you can hear them screaming.”
― Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box

“Prison didn't frighten him especially. He had a lot of fans in there.”
― Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box

“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

“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, Locke and Key, Vol. 2: Head Games

“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

“-one teebs? You mean tablespoon?"
"I don't know.”
― Joe Hill, Locke and Key, Vol. 2: Head Games