Quotes from Joe Hill

But Terry doesn't touch her, won't touch her, never touches her. In a decade of knowing her, he has kept her at a friendly distance, even in his imagination, has never once considered allowing her into his sexual fantasies. There would be no harm in such a thing, yet he senses he would be placing something at risk all the same. What he would be placing at risk, he cannot say. To Terry the word "soul" first refers to a kind of music.

At first my father didn't like Art, but after he got to know him better he really hated him.

She seemed almost to have a perverse impulse to make anyone who cared about her regret it, to find the thing that would most appall those people and then do that until they had to run away as a matter of self-preservation.

Someone probably a lot smarter than me said hell is other people. I say you're in hell when you don't give to someone who needs, because you can't bear to have less.

People just have to keep on going, because you never know when something wonderful is going to happen.

That is the most wonderful sentence I have ever heard. I want that on my gravestone. Snuffleupagus was real. No more. Just that." Harper

The child outliving the parents is the only happy story us human beings get.

People were entranced by flame and repelled by human suffering, and wasn't that some kind of design flaw?

Then Glenn Beck burned to death on his Internet program, right in front of his chalkboard, burned so hot his glasses fused to his face

Sometimes it seemed to him he was allergic to expressing himself. Often, when he desperately wanted to say a thing, he could actually feel his windpipe closing up on him, cutting off his air.

Maggie said, "If 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. Whap the girls on the butts and send them off to their tricks as fast and often as I can.

Humanity is a germ that thrives on the very edge of catastrophe.

Basically, it comes down do this: You can live life as a cripple or a coward. What happens now is up to you.

one teebs? You mean tablespoon?" "I don't know.

Just a lot of 'fuck fuck fuck' over and over again? Can't you expand your range a little? Goddamn bloody arsefoam. Daddy drilling Mommy on the kitchen table. That sort of thing. Americans curse without any imagination at all.

I put the Fifth of November and the Fourth of July to shame. Who needs Roman candles when you've got me?

The price of being alive is that someday you aren't.

Teenagers! What the heck is wrong with them?! Just when you're about to get a good snowball fight going, they have to ruin it by talking about 'relationships'!

He had won it as a child, playing Scriptural Jeopardy in his Sunday-school class. When faced with answers from the Bible, Ig had all the right questions.

The man-nurse was his age and had sleepy eyes with dark circles under them, and a jutting Cro-Magnon forehead. His name tag said, improbably, bilbo. He had a spaceship tattooed on one hairy forearm: Serenity from the TV show Firefly. " 'I am a leaf on the wind,' " Lou said, and the man-nurse said, "Dude, don't say that. I don't want to start crying on the job.

Some Arab invented the idea of the number zero," I said. "Isn't that weird? Someone had to think zero up."   Because it isn't obvious—that nothing can be something. That something which can't be measured or seen could still exist and have meaning. Same with the soul, when you think about it.  

Christmas was almost three months in the rearview mirror, and there was something awful about Christmas music when it was nearly summer. It was like a clown in the rain, with his makeup running.

Arson is almost as good as Prozac.

Lee's face was a Spock-on-the-bridge-of-the-Enterprise blank.