Quotes from Joe Hill

He thought the government was trying to enslave humanity by controlling grammar.

Are you sure I can't have a little sniff of Oxy?" the doctor asked. He brightened. "I'd share. We could get fucked up together.

That's what was on the video," Lee said, a little breathlessly. "Horns. Holy fucking shit. I thought it was a bad tape. But it wasn't something wrong with the tape. It was something wrong with you.

You're people, too. Do something nice for yourself.

If hell was anything, it was talk radio—and family.

When he smiled, she saw that his mouth was full of little hooks, rows of them, each as small and delicate as a sewing needle.

books were girls, and reading was s-ss-ssss—fucking, this would be the biggest whorehouse in the county and I'd be the most ruthless pimp you ever met.

She wrote she heard them hammering nails all day long and that it was like living next to a coffin maker after a plague. When

Lindy became an instructor at an upscale gym, where she taught aerobic pole dancing

Wayne didn't interact with nature. He took pictures of it with his iPhone and then bent over the screen and poked at it. His favorite thing about the lake house was that it had Wi-Fi.

The foundry lay open to the sky, brick arches and pillars rising away into the slanting reddish light. Thirty years of overlapping graffiti covered the walls. The individual messages were mostly incoherent, but then perhaps the individual messages were of no importance. It seemed that all such messages were the same at heart: I Am; I Was; I Want to Be.

The people in charge can always justify doing terrible things in the name of the greater good.

Harper wondered, idly, why it took getting contaminated to notice the marriage itself was sick. He

maybe ghosts always haunted minds, not places.

The girl's pretty little-girl face had deformed, lips stretching wide, becoming like the mouth of a flukeworm, a ragged pink hole encircled with teeth going all the way down her gullet. Her tongue was black, and her breath stank of old meat.

He searched the ground floor and found only shadow and stillness, which should've reassured him but didn't. It was the wrong kind of stillness, the shocked stillness that follows the bang of a cherry bomb. His eardrums throbbed from the pressure of all that quiet, a dreadful silence.

I wanted to explore this idea that the bogey man in the closet is scary, but being a mother is scarier.

The first few days, the worst thing he seen Harold do was take a dump and use the pages from one of the camp library books for toilet paper." 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.

The girl worked the clutch and the gas and the brake expertly with her right foot, just as her father had taught her.

Vic had gotten rid of the Hoff years ago. The Hoff was a loser, and Trans Ams were oil-leaking shitboxes. She didn't miss him.

He felt that when his little men were painted well, they possessed a tension, a suggestion that they might, at any moment, begin to move on their own and charge the French line.

But the thing about my granddad is . . . it's kind of hard to convince him people won't just do the right thing. You hate to say anything that sounds hostile or untrusting or small-hearted around him. You feel like he'd be disappointed in you.

Jude had a private collection.

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.