Quotes from Joe Hill

The best works of art have a tendency to fall through time differently than human beings. They remember, but they also anticipate. A good piece can mean different things to different people at different times, and all of those meanings are true, even if they contradict one another.

Everyone lives in two worlds, right? There's the physical world . . . but there's also our own private inner worlds, the world of our thoughts. A world made of ideas instead of stuff. It's just as real as our world, but it's inside.

All good preachers have a little of the devil in them.

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.

He opened his mouth for a plastic spoonful of peach. She followed it with a long kiss that tasted of golden syrup. When she broke away from him he was smiling. Nick, Renée, and Allie began to clap, standing in a line behind them. Harper showed them her middle finger and kissed him again.

How she loved the smell of road: asphalt baking and soft in high July, dirt roads with their dust-and-pollen perfume in June, country lanes spicy with the odor of crushed leaves in sober October, the sand-and-salt smell of the highway, so like an estuary, in February.

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. I have no doubt it was a sin of some kind, to let such a one go.

They had forgotten their own names, the voices of their mothers, the faces of their fathers.

Falling in love in high school is like thinking you can fly a 747 because you know how to fly a kite.

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.

That night Lee suffered overheated, sexually complicated dreams; he dreamed that Merrin was naked in his bed, and he sat on top of her arms and held her down while he forced a funnel into her mouth, a red plastic funnel, and then poured gasoline into it, and she began to buck under him as in orgasm.

As she stood there looking about, that radio sound resolved into the bluff baritone of Burl Ives, encouraging all the world to have a holly jolly Christmas, and never mind it was the third week of March. The voice was coming from the attached garage, a dingy building with a single roll-up door and four square windows looking into it, milky with filth.

It was no good being a mother. She wanted to start a website, a public-awareness campaign, a newsletter, to get the word out that if you were a woman and you had a child, you lost everything, you would be held hostage by love: a terrorist who would only be satisfied when you surrendered your entire future. The

Some work is about lying down for others, I suppose," he says, and she realizes he is leaping up the last flight of stairs to a wide black glass landing and another set of bronze doors. "And some work is about lifting people up.

Goddamn bloody arsefoam. Daddy drilling Mommy on the kitchen table.

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.

The idea that her death should precede his was worse than intolerable, it was obscene.

She put her hand on the back of his arm and squeezed. She hoped he read that squeeze as /Thank you for caring/ and not /God, I'm horny, we should really screw sometime./ In her experience it was very difficult to offer a man affection and kindness without giving him the impression you were also offering a lay.

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.

Humanity is worse than flies. If even one dried nugget of offal survives the flames, we'll be swarming all over it. Fighting about who owns it and selling the most fragrant chunks to the wealthy and the gullible.

She's talking about cutting a bitch. She'd

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.

FEAR THICKENS TIME, TURNS IT slow and viscous.

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.