Quotes from Joe Hill

I was less a social butterfly than a social death's-head moth.

every man loves a hot girl with a history of making mistakes. Because it's always possible she'll make one with you.

The sound of an English accent distracted her and lifted her spirits. She associated English accents with singing teapots, schools for witchcraft, and the science of deduction. This wasn't, she knew, terribly sophisticated of her, but she had no real guilt about it. She felt the English were themselves to blame for her feelings. They had spent a century relentlessly marketing their detectives and wizards and nannies, and they had to live with the results.

If you can dream a thing, then it has a kind of reality in your thoughts. And if you dream hard enough, and have the right vehicle - a vehicle that you really love, a part of yourself - you can slip right out of reality and into that other, better, imaginary world, where the only reality is the one you allow.

Sam Cleary reached the two old men fighting on the ground and used the fire extinguisher for the first time, bringing it down two-handed to hit Charlie Manx in the face. He would use it for the second time on Tom Priest, not thirty seconds later, by which time Tom was well dead. Not to mention well done.

Everything that is good in the day is even better in the night. A merry-go-round, a ferris wheel, a kiss from a girl.

Most recently she's been helping Bing redecorate his basement. I felt like it needed some color down there, so I painted the walls with the motherfucker

No. I don't think so. It isn't about whether I die. It's about figuring out where. And I've decided. I'm going to see how high I can go. I want to see if it's true. If the sky opens up at the top.

You could look at birds all your life without ever knowing what was a sparrow and what was a blackbird, but we all know a swan when we see it.

She was trying to pull it up to stick it through his throat, but he had her wrist, kept the blade down and his face turned away from its questing edge

I'd netted a bachelor's in English from Boston University, but it had done less for me, in strictly financial terms, than the eight-week course that earned me a commercial driver's license.

Her face was framed by two wings of lank black hair that curled under her long, pointed chin, so she looked like the female version of the wizard who was always giving Harry Potter such a hard time in the movies. Professor Snail or something.

We have all been found guilty of being human. There are worse crimes.

First time I ever joint the Chorus," Don Lewiston said, "I forgot the face of my father

Do you like eighties music, Nurse Willowes?" "Can we discuss the oldies another time?" "What? What? The oldies? I've already had a man kicking in my ribs, and now you pull out my heart." "Hey!

Your personality is not just a matter of what you know about yourself, but what others know about you. You are one person with your mother, and another with your lover, and yet another with your child. Those other people create you—finish you—as much as you create you.

Getting old is no way to stop being young.

She wanted to believe that information brought clarity. Not for the first time in her life, however, she had the disconcerting notion that it was often the opposite. Information was a jar of flies, and when you unscrewed the lid, they went everywhere and good luck to you trying to round them all up again.

Hey! I get to sleep in a library and read books all night! Without pity, where would I be? I'm a total pity s-s-ssslut.

She breathed deeply and smelled water-logged books, the perfume of rotting cardboard and paper that had dried beneath the furnace of the July sun. If a single breath could summarize an entire life, she supposed that would do.

Harper Grayson had seen lots of people burn on TV, everyone had, but the first person she saw burn for real was in the playground behind the school. Schools

Outlaws like to sleep in. I've been FBI for eight years, and I've never once had cause to shoot anyone before eleven in the morning. Not as long as I get my coffee anyway.

I know all about bridges like that one. I know all about roads that can only be found with the mind. One of them is how I find my way to Christmasland. There is the Night Road, and the train tracks to Orphanhenge, and the doors to Mid-World, and the old trail to the Tree House of the Mind, and then there is Victoria's wonderful covered bridge.

You can't let facts get in the way of the truth.