Quotes from Joe Hill

Humanity is worse than flies.

VOTING IS LIKE DRIVING: R GOES BACKWARD, D GOES FORWARD

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.

He had no doubt that Merrin had called out to God here in this place while she was been raped and killed, in her heart if not with her voice. God's reply had been that due to the high volume of calls she could expect to be on hold until she was dead.

Gedding old is no way to stop being young.

That's what I mean. I thought it was only in filthy places no one wants to go, like Chernobyl and Detroit.

In truth, though, she could not bear the idea of having a phone on her all the time, wherever she went. Could not be at ease knowing she might get an urgent call from Christmasland, some dead kid on the line: Hey, Ms. McQueen, did you miss us?!?

But everyone also lives in the world inside their own head. An inscape, a world of thought. In a world made of thought—in an inscape—every idea is a fact.

Carol says we speak with one voice. What she doesn't say is that voice belongs to HER. There's only one song to sing these days--Carol's song--and if you aren't in harmony, you can stick a stone in your mouth and shut the hell up.

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.

He was poured forth into a thunderous torrent of souls, ejected from the earth and any sense of order and into this other, older chaos.

It was bad enough to be stuck in a pipe with a porcupine, worse to be in there with a lunatic, even if the lunatic happened to be herself.

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.

She banged the stick against the side of the pipe, drew it back, and lanced it at the porcupine. "I'll be a candle right up your ass, you don't keep waddling, fat boy," she half sang, half choked. He

Harper had had enough of the porcupine and enough of the drainage pipe. She scooped the stick right under his rear end and shoved him along ahead of her. She felt this had the makings of a new Olympic sport: porcupine curling. The

There's something horribly unfair about dying in the middle of a good story, before you have a chance to see how it all comes out. Of course, I suppose everyone always dies in the middle of a good story, in a sense. Your own story. Or the story of your children. Or your grandchildren. Death is a raw deal for narrative junkies." Around

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

I have to tell you, heroin dealers and meth slingers have made your country a wretched place to be a simple, honest drug dealer who wants to give his customers a lovingly curated experience.

Don't give up on yourself. The dead win when you quit singing and let them take you on down the road with them.

Renée winced. "It turned out to be The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Our only copy. If I had known what he was going to do with it, I would've given him a copy of Atlas Shrugged." "On

Charles Talent Manx the Third at your service, my dear! CEO of Christmasland Enterprises, director of Christmasland Entertainment, president of fun! Also His Eminence, the King Shit of Turd Hill, although it doesn't say that on my card.

Vic didn't have a car and probably spent a hundred and sixty hours a week at home. The house smelled of piss-soaked diapers and engine parts, and the sink was always full. In retrospect Vic was only surprised she didn't go crazy sooner. She was surprised that more young mothers didn't lose it. When your tits had become canteens and the soundtrack to your life was hysterical tears and mad laughter, how could anyone expect you to remain sane?

Whatever the children had become, whatever he had done to them, he had done to make them safe, to keep them from being run down by the world. He believed in his own decency with all his heart.

In truth, Jude suspected that Danny had no particular musical preferences, no strong likes or dislikes, and that the radio was just background sound, the auditory equivalent of wallpaper.