Quotes from Joe Hill

It went to show that no one knew, when they abandoned a thing, what misuses it would be put to later by others.

Her anger didn't have a fixed point.

It is my belief that, as a rule, creatures of Happy's ilk—I am thinking here of canines and men both—more often run free than live caged, and it is in fact a world of mud and feces they desire, a world with no Art in it, or anyone like him, a place where there is no talk of books or God or the worlds beyond this world, a place where the only communication is the hysterical barking of starving and hate-filled dogs.

In this world, family is the final, most elemental unit of power. A small group, helplessly bound together by blood with a shared set of skills and tools for consolidating power and subjugating others.

To live for others was to live fully; to live only for yourself, a cold kind of death.

It was as if the room beyond the blast furnace was a tub and someone had turned the faucets on the cold and hot running snakes.

I think while I was passed out, I dreamed about my mom's gingerbread cookies. Maybe the guy who knocked on the glass was eatin' one." "Mm," said Peace-not-War. "Well. That's helpful. We'll put an APB out on the Gingerbread Man. I'm not hopeful it'll do us much good, though. Word on the street is you can't catch him.

So much of what was best in life went unnoticed in the moments you had it.

Your beard and your big leather jacket and your big black car and your big black boots. No one puts on all that armor unless they been hurt by someone who didn't have no right to hurt them.

It was reassuring to know our national leaders were using all the resources at their disposal to help the desperate: social media and Jesus.

Then, for a while, it was quite still in the old foundry, where the man and the devil lay side by side--although which was which would perhaps have been a matter for theological debate.

Just think, if you had a gun" he said to her "This story might have a different ending.

I remember Aslan dead on the stone and the mice nibbling at the ropes that bound his corpse. I think that provided me with my foundational sense of decency. To live a decent life is to be no more than a mouse nibbling at a rope. One mouse isn't much, but if enough of us keep chewing, we may set something free that can save us from the worst. Maybe it will even save us from ourselves.

That's it? 'Damn, it smells like the fishsticks are burning and don't do that with your head, Bode?' What the fuck?

And you're not an envoy from the lord?" "You're not an angel?" "Nope. Just a librarian." Aw, well, she said, "That's close enough for me." ~Full Throttle by Joe Hill

Death and ruin is man's preferred ecosystem.

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.

He looked cold in his little loincloth, so Bing flicked a match and dressed him in a robe of flame

When I get excited about a movie I need to talk.

Jude wondered if the chip was smart enough to tell the difference between a dog and a naked psychotic scrambling around on all fours with a knife in his teeth.

Does your license plate mean something?" Bing asked. "En-o-ess-four-a-two?" "Nosferatu," the man Charlie Manx said. "Nosfer-what-who?" Manx said, "It is one of my little jokes. My first wife once accused me of being a Nosferatu. She did not use that exact word, but close enough.

He had long accepted that everyone had his own world inside, each as real as the communal world shared by all but impossible for others to access.

All you had to see was the bumper sticker on their Prius—VOTING IS LIKE DRIVING: R GOES BACKWARD, D GOES FORWARD—to know we were going to be all right.

His father had smashed his very first guitar for him, in an early attempt to rid Jude of his musical ambitions. Jude hadn't been able to repeat the act himself, not even onstage, for show, when he could afford all the guitars he wanted. He was, however, perfectly willing to use one as a weapon to defend himself. In a sense he supposed he had always used them as weapons.