Quotes from Joe Hill

It's awfully good of some people to have asked me to take the job, but I'd rather read about a grand escape than plan one. Besides, I'm terrible at keeping secrets and I hate to scheme against people. It seems rude. I don't deal with guilt well and I'm worried we might hurt some feelings in the process of defending ourselves. Also, I am juggling a couple of books. Being a full-time conspirator would take away from my reading time.

he thought how the young are pierced by love, innocent bodies torn and ruined for no reason, save that it suited someone who held them dear.

I told you had to be some kind of karmic opposite to the words I love you.

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. When Wayne fell asleep, his hot cheek against her naked breast, his lips smelling sweetly of the milk from her own body, she felt as if she was the one who had been fed.

Finish the book. Finish the book, regardless of how bad it is. You can make it better in a rewrite.

It was bad enough that she had been so utterly convinced he had a brilliant mind, but much worse to discover he was convinced of it, too, and on such thin evidence. It

She was sitting on the floor, beneath the phone, with her arms wrapped around her, when Lou found her. "You been, like, sitting out here for a while," he said. "Do you want me to bring you a blanket or a dead tauntaun or something?

It was the end of the world, but you could still hit the drive-thru on your way to oblivion.

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

What frightened him was not the thought that he was a prisoner of Charlie Manx but that for a moment he had forgotten he was a prisoner. For a moment he had been admiring the light and feeling almost happy.

They were in a trench sliding through a forest of corn. Machine stood over the rows, black girders that arced in the sky like the proscenium above a stage. The thought occurred to Wayne that those machines were sprayers, full of poison. They would drench the corn in a lethal rain to keep it from being eaten by invasive species. Those exact words - "invasive species" - rang through his brain. Later the corn would be lightly washed and people would eat it.

If I die in a plane crash remember to always bag and board your comics.

Why are there so many romantic songs about the spring? I hate the spring. The snow melts, and everything smells like thawing dog shit.

in the battle between anxiety and social custom, social custom almost always won.

As a world of shared ideas, Twitter is a kind of Inscape in and of itself, and a good one.

Boy, this is your lucky day!" She clapped her hands. "You found yourself a librarian! I can help wit the figuring-out thing and point you toward some good poetry while I'm at it. It's what I do.

Too many people die in hospitals, and if you can't be helped, you have to wonder why.

She bought tennis rackets, didn't know if Wayne knew how to play. It had been so long for herself that she couldn't even remember how to score. She just knew that even when you had nothing, you still had love.

Then Glenn Beck burned to death on his Internet program, right in front of his chalkboard, burned so hot his glasses fused to his face, and after that most of the news was less about who did it and more about how not to catch it.

He was often crushed by the decency of other people who had almost nothing themselves; at times he felt their kindnesses so powerfully he thought it would destroy some delicate inner part of him.

They're looking for you," she told him. "I heard it on the radio." "They better be careful," he said, without looking back at her. "They might find me.

I'm not supposed to suh-ss-sleep in the library, but Ms. Howard lets me get away with it if it's only now and then. She pities me, because I'm an orphan and kind of weird. That's okay. I don't mind. People make out like it's a terrible thing to be pitied, but I say, Hey! I get to sleep in a library and read books all night! Without pity, where would I be? I'm a total pity s-s-ssslut.

The aspiring novelist in me wants a secret tunnel hidden behind a false wall, or a poster of a famous movie star

It was as if the day's whole motion had merely described a great circle that was always, inevitably, going to lead him back to where he had started.