Joe Hill Quotations

Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.

Sooner or later a black car came for everyone.

I will be waiting by candlelight in our tree house of the mind.

You'll have pie in the sky when you die.

There's only room for one hero in this story-and everyone knows the devil doesn't get to be the good guy.

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.

Her sanity was a fragile thing, a butterfly cupped in her hands, that she carried with her everywhere, afraid of what would happen if she let it go-or got careless and crushed it.

Well. That's helpful. We'll put an APB out on the Gingerbread Man. I'm not hopeful it'll do us much good, though. Word on the street is you can't catch him.

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.

She just knew that even when you had nothing, you still had love.

Pick a sin we can both live with, is what I ask.

Work and pray, live on hay, youll get pie in the sky when you die.

Some things you didn't give away, no matter how much you owed.

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

Don't believe everything you hear today

I didn't know the inner me was hungry," I said to Art. "That's because it already starved to death.

She liked things that had been written by people who had lived short, ugly, and tragic lives. Or, who at least, were English.

I remember an era when you could get your nose sliced off for sticking it too far into another man's business. Now you can find out anything about anyone with the click of a button. There is no privacy and no consideration, and everyone is prying into things that aren't their affair. You can probably check on the intertube and find out what color underwear I have on today.

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.

I want you to remember what was good in me, not what was most awful. The people you love should be allowed to keep their worst to themselves.

It's like in the Bible.You can't always get what you want, but if you really need something, you usually find it." "What part of the Bible is that from?" Ig asked her. "The Gospel of Keith Richards?

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.

I hope if there is another world, we will not be judged too harshly for the things we did wrong here—that we will at least be forgiven for the mistakes we made out of love.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

Love requires Context.

Maybe all the schemes of the devil were nothing compared to what man could think up.

I am; I was. I want to be.

It bewildered Ig, the idea that a person could not be interested in music. It was like not being interested in happiness.

Don't ever have children, Tyler, unless you're ready to be afraid everyday for the rest of your life.

When you think about it, most of the good ideas came along to make sin a whole lot easier.

Already, though, she understood the difference between being a child and being an adult. The difference is when someone says he can keep the bad things away, a child believes him.

You loved me as hard as you knew how. I'd give anything to go back and love you better...

Aren't you going to tell me I'm not so bad? she asked. Mmm-no. I was thinking how every man loves a hot girl with a history of making mistakes. Because it's always possible she'll make one with you.

You can't let facts get in the way of the truth.

Men, she thought, were one of the world's few sure comforts, like a fire on a cold October night, like cocoa, like broken-in-slippers. Their clumsy affections, their bristly faces, and their willingness to do what needed to be done - cook an omelette, change lightbulbs, make with hugging - sometimes almost made being a woman fun.

I'll take the shooting. I'm used to that. I've been shot a few times in the past, and I guess I can stand it, again.

The blood of a redheaded woman is three degrees cooler than the blood of a normal woman. This has been established by medical studies.

The difference between childhood and adulthood, Vic had come to believe, was the difference between imagination and resignation. You traded one for the other and lost your way.

We'll have freedom, love and health/When the grand red flag is flying, In the Workers' Commonwealth.

Were talking about an attitude. Delayed gratification is there, planning, be able to give up something now to get something later.

Innocence ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know. Innocent little kids rip the wings off flies, because they don’t know any better. That’s innocence

If the workers took a notion they could stop all speeding trains; every ship upon the ocean they can tie with mighty chains.

I have nothing to say for myself, only that I have always tried to make this earth a little bit better

And he paddled away in his douche canoe.

What a blessed if painful thing, this business of being alive.

Don't mourn, Organise

Gold don't come off. What's good stays good no matter how much of a beating it takes.

Terror is the desire to save your own ass, but horror is rooted in sympathy.

She'd thought love had something to do with happiness, but it turned out they were not even vaguely related. Love was closer to a need, no different from the need to eat, to breathe.

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.

You know someone for a while and then one day a hole opens underneath them, and they fall out of your world.

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.

I felt like it needed some color down there, so I painted the walls with the motherfucker.

The language of sin was universal, the original Esperanto.

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.

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.

You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know.

... people made the imaginary real all the time: taking the music they heard in their head and recording it, seeing a house in their imagination and building it. Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.

She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.

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.

I remind myself that no one day of writing matters all that much. A story is built somewhat like a stalactite - one little drip of mud and grit at a time.

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

I will die like a true-blue rebel. Don't waste any time in mourning - organize.

Was there any human urge more pitiful-or more intense- than wanting another chance at something?

Music [is] the third rail of life. You grabbed it to shock yourself out of the dull drag of hours. To feel something. To burn with all the emotions you didn't get to experience in the ordinary run of school, TV, and loading the dishwasher after dinner.

To be honest, I think cell phones were invented by the devil.

A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over. And I maintain that if a person can put a few common sense facts into a song and dress them up in a cloak of humor, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read.

I guess Satan was the first superhero [...] In his first adventure, he took the form of a snake to free two prisoners being held naked in a Third World jungle prison by an all-powerful megalomaniac. At the same time, he broadened their diet and introduced them to their own sexuality.

The best way to get even with anyone is to put them in the rearview mirror on your way to something better.

Longhaired preachers come out every night, Tryin' to tell us what's wrong and what's right. But when asked about something to eat, They will tell you in voices so sweet. You will eat (You will eat!) By and by, (By and by!) In that glorious land in the sky. (Way up high!) Work and pray, live on hay, You'll get pie in the sky when you die. (That's a lie!)

Workers of the world awaken. Break your chains, demand your rights. All the wealth you make is taken, by exploiting parasites. Shall you kneel in deep submission from your cradle to your grave? Is the height of your ambition to be a good and willing slave?

All the world is made of music. We are all strings on a lyre. We resonate. We sing together.

I mean, when the world comes for your children, with the knives out, it's your job to stand in the way.