JHJoe Hill

82 collected words

Joe Hill

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

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. Whereas women offer a different sort of salvation, more immediate and fulfilling. They don't put off their love for a distant, ill-defined eternity but make a gift of it in the here and now, frequently to those who deserve it least. So it was in my case. So it is for many. The devil and woman have been allies against God from the beginning...

Joe Hill / quote

02Undated

He paused, twisting his goatee, considering the law in Deuteronomy that forbade clothes with mixed fibers. A problematic bit of Scripture. A matter that required thought. "Only the devil wants man to have a wide range of lightweight and comfortable styles to choose from," he murmured at last, trying out a new proverb. "Although there may be no forgiveness for polyester. On this one matter, Satan and the Lord are in agreement.

Joe Hill / quote

03Undated

The Incas were right to worship the sun, Father. God is fire. Combustion is the one inarguable blessing. A tree, oil, coal, a man, a civilization, a soul. They've all got to burn sometime. The warmth made by their passing may be the salvation of others. The ultimate value of the Bible, the Constitution, or any work of literature, really, is that they all burn very well, and for a while they keep back the cold.

Joe Hill / quote

04Undated

You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know.

Joe Hill / quote

05Undated

She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.

Joe Hill / quote

06Undated

Fear does not incline people to be moderate in their use of extreme tactics.

Joe Hill / quote

07Undated

Everyone lives in two worlds,” Maggie said, speaking in an absentminded sort of way while she studied her letters. “There’s the real world, with all its annoying facts and rules. In the real world, there are things that are true and things that aren’t. Mostly the real world s-s-s-suh-sucks. But everyone also lives in the world inside their own head. An inscape, a world of thought. In a world made of thought—in an inscape—every idea is a fact. Emotions are as real as gravity. Dreams are as powerful as history. Creative people, like writers, and Henry Rollins, spend a lot of their time hanging out in their thoughtworld. S-s-strong creatives, though, can use a knife to cut the stitches between the two worlds, can bring them together. Your bike. My tiles. Those are our knives.

Joe Hill / quote

08Undated

[Lou]: “I’m not talking about the angioplasty. I mean the stuff you’re pumping into me. What is it? Something serious?”[Nurse]: “Oh. This is nothing. You’re not going under the knife today, so you don’t get the good shit. This is a blood-thinning agent. Also, it’ll mellow you out. Got to keep the mellows going.”[Lou]: “It’ll put me to sleep?”[Nurse]: “Faster than a marathon of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.

Joe Hill / quote

09Undated

I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. The author is unworthy of His own characters.

Joe Hill / quote

10Undated

You sure you're all right? You aren't out here pondering dark female thoughts are you?

Joe Hill / quote

11Undated

The soul is an irrational, indivisible equation that perfectly expresses one thing: you. The soul would be no good to the devil if it could be destroyed. And it is not lost when placed in Satan's care, as is so often said. He always know exactly how to put his finger on it.

Joe Hill / quote

12Undated

Whatever your sexual orientation, whatever your ethnicity, whatever your age or personal experience, it is my hope you will find a hero somewhere here you can relate to, that speaks to the world as you see it. Even better: there is a good chance you will find some heroes who are deeply, fundamentally different from yourself. I don't have much patience with readers who yearn to explore incredible worlds and mind-bending situations but grow cold at the idea of imagining their way into different political ideas, different faiths, a different gender, a different skin, a different life.

Joe Hill / quote

13Undated

There's something horribly unfair about dying in the middle of a good story, before you have a chance to see how it all comes out. Of course, I suppose everyone ALWAYS dies in the middle of a good story, in a sense. Your own story. Or the story of your grandchildren. Death is a raw deal for narrative junkies.

Joe Hill / quote

14Undated

Humanity is worse than flies.

Joe Hill / quote

15Undated

I liked AC/DC," Lee said. "If you were going to shoot someone, you'd really want to do it while you were listening to them.""What about the Beatles? Did you feel like shooting anyone listening to them?"Lee considered seriously for a moment, then said, "Myself."At the same time he was laughing, Ig was distressed. Not liking the Beatles was almost as bad as not knowing about them at all.

Joe Hill / quote

16Undated

All the world is made of music. We are all strings on a lyre. We resonate. We sing together.

Joe Hill / quote

17Undated

It bewildered Ig, the idea that a person could not be interested in music. It was like not being interested in happiness.

Joe Hill / quote

18Undated

He had no doubt that Merrin had called out to God here in this place while she was been raped and killed, in her heart if not with her voice. God's reply had been that due to the high volume of calls she could expect to be on hold until she was dead.

Joe Hill / quote

19Undated

Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.

Joe Hill / quote

20Undated

Eighteen and stupid happens to everyone, I guess. If you survive it, it's probably half luck, and half having the right people in your life to watch out for you.

Joe Hill / quote

21Undated

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.

Joe Hill / quote

22Undated

They had been Vince's brothers in a way, and Race was his son, and you couldn't drive a man's family to the earth and expect to live.

Joe Hill / quote

23Undated

The people in charge can always justify doing terrible things in the name of the greater good. A slaughter here, a little torture there. It becomes moral to do things that would be immoral if an ordinary individual did ’em.

Joe Hill / quote

24Undated

But it turned out life was more like the kind of song the Stones wrote: you didn't get any satisfaction, you took one hit to the body after another, if you were a woman you were a bitch who belonged under someone's thumb, and if you wanted mother's little helper from your dear doctor you better have the silver, take it or leave it, and don't come crying for sympathy, that was just for the devil.

Joe Hill / quote