Strange Weather Quotes

“Maturity is not something that happens all at once. It is not a border between two countries where once you cross the invisible line, you are on the new soil of adulthood, speaking the foreign tongue of grown-ups. It is more like a distant broadcast, and you are driving toward it, and sometimes you can barely make it out through the hiss of static while other times the reception momentarily clears and you can pick up the signal with perfect clarity.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather

“The president had disappeared to a secure location but had responded with the full force of his Twitter account. He posted: “OUR ENEMIES DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY STARTED! PAYBACK IS A BITCH!!! #Denver #Colorado #America!!” The vice president had promised to pray as hard as he could for the survivors and the dead; he pledged to stay on his knees all day and all night long. It was reassuring to know our national leaders were using all the resources at their disposal to help the desperate: social media and Jesus.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather

“Most of my favorite stories as a reader come in at this length. Short novels are all killer, no filler. They offer the economy of the short story but the depth of characterization we associate with longer works. Little novels aren’t leisurely, meandering journeys. They’re drag races. You put the pedal to the floor and run your narrative right off the edge of the cliff. Live fast and leave a pretty corpse is a shitty objective for a human being but a pretty good plan for a story.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather

“It was reassuring to know our national leaders were using all the resources at their disposal to help the desperate: social media and Jesus.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather: Four Short Novels

“All you had to see was the bumper sticker on their Prius—VOTING IS LIKE DRIVING: R GOES BACKWARD, D GOES FORWARD—to know we were going to be all right.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather

“Just think, if you had a gun” he said to her “This story might have a different ending.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather: Four Short Novels

“It was the end of the world, but you could still hit the drive-thru on your way to oblivion.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather

“I was less a social butterfly than a social death’s-head moth.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather

“Getting old is no way to stop being young.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather: Four Short Novels

“Why are there so many romantic songs about the spring? I hate the spring. The snow melts, and everything smells like thawing dog shit.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather: Four Short Novels

“Imagination was a cancer of the heart. All those lives you carried around in your head that you wouldn’t ever get to live—they filled you up until you couldn’t breathe.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather

“FEAR THICKENS TIME, TURNS IT slow and viscous. One second of deeply felt terror lasts longer than ten regular seconds.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather

“I had discovered some time ago that nothing frees the mind like dropping the pants. Try it if you doubt me. American productivity would, I believe, nearly double if everyone were free to work pantsless.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather

“I’ve already visited the lost and lonely place at the end of the world, and all I know is, the only way to keep going is to do the things the people you loved would’ve wanted you to do.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather

“If ghosts have a color, then they are the color of an August thunderstorm getting ready to break.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather

“Gedding old is no way to stop being young.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather

“Invent a way not to ged old,” he said. “It is a terrible goddem trick to play on someone. Gedding old is no way to stop being young.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather

“Ever try not to think? It’s like trying not to breathe—no one can do it for long.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather

“All good preachers have a little of the devil in them.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather

“It is odd how much we want to be in love when you think about how much anxiety comes with it, like a tax on money you won in the lottery.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather

“VOTING IS LIKE DRIVING: R GOES BACKWARD, D GOES FORWARD”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather

“Any pattern repeated over and over is bound to turn into wallpaper eventually, whether it’s flowers or corpses.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather

“Was anything in all the world more heartrending than being found out by someone you wanted to love you?”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather

“Give a man a choice between reality and loneliness or fantasy and community, he’ll pick having friends every time.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather

“All it took to turn a CD into a knife or a tape gun into a .45 was a little imagination, a little panic, and a lot of prejudice.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather

“FEAR THICKENS TIME, TURNS IT slow and viscous.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather

“She was being erased a little at a time by a cancer that fed not on her flesh but on her inner life, on her private store of happiness.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather

“Even after you lost someone, it turned out you still had a relationship with that person, one you needed to tend to as you would tend to a relationship with any living friend or relative.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather: Four Short Novels

“It was even softer and fluffier than I’d imagined. It was like wearing an Ewok.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather

“The air was rank, and on my left, in a broad green meadow, arranged neatly in pairs, were dead lions and dead walruses and dead gazelles. It was like some horrible parade leading towards a cruel parody of Noah's ark, a ship for everything that was gone and never coming back, everything that would not be saved.”
― Joe Hill, Strange Weather: Four Short Novels