Heart-Shaped Box Quotes

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

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

“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

“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 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

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

“When you were a Goth, it was important to at least imply the possibility you might burst into flames in direct sunlight.”
― Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box

“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

“The dead pull the living down.”
― Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box

“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

“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

“The dead win when you quit singing and let them take you on down the road with them.”
― Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box

“I feel bad for her. It's not a lot of fun, you know."
"What?"
"Being in love with you. I've been with a lot of bad guys who made me feel lousy about myself, Jude, but you're something special. Because I knew none of them really cared about me, but you do, and you make me feel like your shitty hooker anyway.”
― 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

“He had always known he would go out this way: on fire. He had always known that rage was flammable, dangerous to store under pressure, where he had kept it his whole life.”
― Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box

“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

“She’d done things to him he thought only happened to characters in country-western songs, laying waste to his car, his dogs, driving him from his home, and making an outlaw of him. It was almost funny.”
― Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box

“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

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

“Your beard and your big leather jacket and your big black car and your big black boots. No one puts on all that armor unless they been hurt by someone who didn’t have no right to hurt them.”
― Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box

“A lot of his songs, when they started out, sounded like old music. They arrived on his doorstep, wandering orphans, the lost children of large and venerable musical families. They came to him in the form of Tin Pan Alley sing-alongs, honky-tonk blues, Dust Bowl plaints, lost Chuck Berry riffs. Jude dressed them in black and taught them to scream.”
― Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box

“I wish you didn't first see me takin' my clothes off for drunks. I wish we didn't meet in a strip club. I wish you could've known me before I started with that kind of thing. Before I got like I am. Before I did all the things I wish I could take back.

You know how people pay more money to buy furniture that's been roughed up a little? What do they call it? Things that have been distressed? That's because something that's seen a little wear is just more interesting than something brand-new that hasn't ever had a scuff on it.”
― Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box

“Jude wondered if the chip was smart enough to tell the difference between a dog and a naked psychotic scrambling around on all fours with a knife in his teeth.”
― Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box

“His father had smashed his very first guitar for him, in an early attempt to rid Jude of his musical ambitions. Jude hadn’t been able to repeat the act himself, not even onstage, for show, when he could afford all the guitars he wanted. He was, however, perfectly willing to use one as a weapon to defend himself. In a sense he supposed he had always used them as weapons.”
― Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box

“It was hard to venture back near the place you had been bred without settling into the characteristics of the person you had been there.”
― Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box

“No plane. Planes are too fast. You can’t go south on a plane. You need to drive. Or take a train. You need to watch the dirt turn to clay. You need to look at all the junkyards full of rustin’ cars. You need to go over a few bridges. They say that evil spirits can’t follow you over running water, but that’s just humbug. You ever notice rivers in the North aren’t like rivers in the South? Rivers in the South are the color of chocolate, and they smell like marsh and moss. Up here they’re black, and they smell sweet, like pines. Like Christmas.”
― Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box

“What he'd thought of as a personal strength---he was happy to know about her only what she wanted him to know---was something more like selfishness. A childish willingness to remain in the dark, to avoid distressing conversations, upsetting truths. He had feared her secrets---or, more specifically, the emotional entanglements that might come with knowing them.”
― Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box

“Too many people die in hospitals, and if you can’t be helped, you have to wonder why.”
― Joe Hill, Heart-Shaped Box

“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