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

"Horror was rooted in sympathy . . . in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst. "
— 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)

"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: A Novel)

"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: A Novel)

"You want sympathy, go fuck James Taylor."
— Joe Hill (Heart-Shaped Box: A Novel)

"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

"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)

"Don't ever have children, Tyler, unless you're ready to be afraid everyday for the rest of your life."
— Joe Hill (Locke & Key: Crown of Shadows)

"Don't waste time mourning. Organize"
— Joe Hill