Full Throttle

by Joe Hill

For me, a lifelong bookworm, there was nothing quite so awful as the thought of dying fifty pages from the end of a good novel.

“In one sense, you know, it’s perfectly unremarkable. It’s quite common to enter a library and find yourself in conversation with the dead. The best minds of generations long gone crowd every bookshelf. They wait there to be noticed, to be addressed, and to reply in turn.

Vietnam had taught him that the army would napalm naked children to stop a political ideology based on people sharing what they have with one another.

Ancient religions used to tell people that letting go of yearning is the highest form of spirituality.

Isn’t that the whole point of birthdays? To remind you the meter is running down?

as transparent as breath.

She wished she were still the kind of person who could hug a pillow and weep over what she had lost. But in truth maybe she had never been that kind of person.

the crash and sigh of the sea, as the tide consummated the desire of water to pound the earth into submission.

you could have cut the lack of surprise and spread it on bread.