Quotes from Joe Hill

The dead pull the living down.

He believed in his own decency with all his heart. So it was with every true monster, Vic supposed.

People would believe almost any awful thing their private devil told them.

It was perhaps, the devil's oldest precept, that sin could always be trusted to reveal what was most human in a person as often for good as for ill.

So many of man's inventions - the syringe, the sword, the pen, the gun - were metaphorical cocks, but the internal combustion engine had to have been dreamt up by a man who had looked upon the human heart.

It seemed to her sometimes that this was the only fight that mattered: the struggle to take the world's chaos and make it mean something, to put it to words.

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.

Your impulse to protect me conflicts with my need to protect my self-respect. Sorry. Besides. I have this vaguely uneasy feeling you're offering to protect me from you. That's not doing me a kindness -- that's coercion.

I feel bad for her. It's not a lot of fun, you know." "What?" "Being in love with you. I've been with a lot of bad guys who made me feel lousy about myself, Jude, but you're something special. Because I knew none of them really cared about me, but you do, and you make me feel like your shitty hooker anyway.

I've always thought that when something really bad happens to a person, other people just have to know about it. You can't be a tree falling in the woods with no one to hear you crash.

He threw the Bible into the trumpet case as well. There had to be something in there, some useful tips for his situation, a homeopathic remedy that you could apply when you came down with a bad case of the devil.

If you were going to live in hell on earth, there was something to be said for being one of the devils.

I miss you, Jude. I'm looking forward to putting my arms around you. We're going to sing just like the old days. Everyone sings here. After a while it kind of sounds like screaming. Just listen. Listen and you can hear them screaming.

Terry is sure that Ig has never even kissed another girl, let alone fucked one, and he has wished for a while now that Iggy had more experience. Not because Terry didn't want his brother to be with Merrin, but because...well, because. Because love requires context. Because first relationships are by their very nature immature. So Merrin wanted them both to have a chance to grow up. So what?

Live pretty or die laughing, but don't you run. Don't you fucking run.

Poor kids often dressed up. It was rich kids who dressed down, carefully assembling a blue-collar costume: eighty-dollar designer jeans that had been professionally faded and tattered and worn-out

I do not claim that God is dead. I tell you. He is alive and well but in no position to offer salvation, being damned Himself for His lacrimal indifference. He was lost the moment He demanded fealty and worship before He would offer His protection. The unmistakeable bargain of a gangster. Whereas the devil is anything but indifferent. The devil is always there to help those who are ready to sin, which is another word for 'live'.

When you feel helpless, you'll do just about any old thing to shut off your head.

if God hates sin and Satan punishes the sinners, aren't they working the same side of the street?

It's quite common to enter a library and find yourself in conversation with the dead. The best minds of generations long gone crowd every bookshelf. They wait there to be noticed, to be addressed, and to reply in turn. In the library the dead meet the living on collegial terms as a matter of course, every day.

Scientists never study the important things. Like why some animals seem to have evolved the ability to gloat.

By the time I knew it was a mistake, it was too late to come back. That's usually how it is.

The dead win when you quit singing and let them take you on down the road with them.

It sounded like delusion until you remembered that 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.