Joe Hill Quotes

After he pulled the trigger, Bing sat with the old man and listened to the rain rattle off the roof of the garage, while John Partridge sprawled on the floor, one foot twitching and a urine stain spreading across the front of his pants. Bing had sat until his mother entered the garage and began to scream. Then it had been her turn - although not for the nail gun.

I didn't know the inner me was hungry," I said to Art.
"That's because it already starved to death.

Everyone you lost was still there with you, and so maybe no one was ever lost at all.

Silence is the purest form of harmony. Everyone ought to try it. Put a stone in your mouth instead of a lie. Put a rock on your tongue instead of gossip. Bury the liars and the wicked under stones until they say no more. More weight, hallelujah.

It was impossible to have a conversation in a room with a phone. It was like having a conversation in a room with a bat hanging from the ceiling. Even if the bat was asleep, how were you supposed to think about anything else or look at anything else?

The fires of hell are not hot enough for a man - or woman! - who would hurt his children.

It's because she doesn't love being lonely. When a girl loses her virginity, though, it may hurt, but it's real. It might be the realest, most private thing you could ever see in another person. You wonder who she'll be in that moment, when you finally get past all the pretend.

Vic's father was badass. Other dads built things. Hers blew shit up and rode away on a Harley, smoking the cigarette he used to light the fuse. Top that.

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

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.

The problem with role models is they teach you roles.

They had eaten at a place called Terry's for lunch, Terry's Primo Subs in Hampton, which was back in New Hampshire, on the sea.

I remind myself that no one day of writing matters all that much. A story is built somewhat like a stalactite - one little drip of mud and grit at a time.

They're not bad people, most of them. All they want is to be safe." "Isn't that always a permission slip for ugliness and cruelty? All they want is to be safe, and they don't care who they have to destroy to stay that way. And

Ecstasy? Like the drug?" Michelle asked. "Wow. Trippy. They were into that back then?" "No. Not like the drug. Like fun. She's a symbol of never-ending fun.

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.

She wasn't sure good intentions always paved the road to hell, but they for sure weren't the highest standard of medical care. She

You're so adorable when you're nautical,

The Brat - Victoria to her second-grade teacher, Vicki to her mother, but the Brat to her father and in her heart - was

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

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. She

Because love requires context.

When she wasn't painting, when she didn't have creative work to occupy her, she became aware of a growing physical apprehension, like she was standing beneath a crane that was holding a piano aloft; at any moment she felt that the cables could snap and all that weight could fall upon her with a fatal crash.

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

Heroism was exhausting business.

He thought the government was trying to enslave humanity by controlling grammar.

Every thought I have is colored by what I learned by what I learned from reading Ray Bradbury.

Humanity is worse than flies.

It was something ... the way a person's life picked up speed, the way a life was like a bullet aimed at one final target, impossible to slow or turn aside, and like the bullet, you were ignorant of what you were going to hit, would never know anything except the rush and the impact.

Don't ever have children, Tyler, unless you're ready to be afraid everyday for the rest of your life.

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.

They glowed in the darkness, all of them: pale shining wisps with rings of light where their eyes belonged, as if they were the dead - ghosts risen from their graves - not Gilbert Cline. Harper felt their grief as a slow current of cold water, and herself as a leaf revolving upon it. As

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.

Time must be slowed to a crawl to make sense of any scene of true chaos - to show the flurry of human action and reaction going off like multiple strings of firecrackers, all at once. Every

So many have wept for Jesus on His cross. As if no one else has ever suffered as He suffered. As if millions have not shuffled to worse deaths, and died unremembered.

When you had a set of wheels that could take you anywhere, you didn't walk away from it.

You don't want to start A Game of Thrones when you might catch fire all of a sudden. 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 children. Or your grandchildren.

There's nothing here that's any different from any of the last dozen EKG readings," Patel said. "Patient scores a nine on the Glasgow scale, shows slow alpha-wave activity consistent with alpha coma. I think he was just talking in his sleep, Nurse. It even happens to gorks like this guy." "His

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.

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

The coat adds +5 to all armor rolls

Dignity is for people who have options. We

My first wife was like the rash you get from poison ivy. I couldn't stand her, but I couldn't keep my hands off her. She was an itch I scratched until I bled
and then I scratched it some more!

I wouldn't underrate the power of regret. It doesn't feel good ... But it's hard to learn anything important without it.

She thought of mothering, which was really another word for being present and caring what happened to someone.

No you can't understand because you are reading the last chapter of something with out having read the first chapters. Young people always think they are coming into a story at the beginning when they are usually coming in at the end.

You know someone for a while and then one day a hole opens underneath them, and they fall out of your world.

PLEEZ BE QUITE IN THE LIBERY PEPLE R TRYING TO GET HI!

And at last Lee said, "What are those goddamn things on your head?" He sounded genuinely surprised. "Jesus, Ig. Are those horns?

It tastes better than a rock." Allie tossed back the quarter inch Harper had given her in a single swallow, then made a face. "Oh, God. No it doesn't. This is piss. Like drinking gasoline after someone stirred it with a Butterfinger. Or like a banana smoothie that went rotten. Horrible." "You

She wrote she heard them hammering nails all day long and that it was like living next to a coffin maker after a plague. When

Ma'am," Cline said, "I hid under dead bodies less cold than you." He glanced at Harper and

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.

He felt that when his little men were painted well, they possessed a tension, a suggestion that they might, at any moment, begin to move on their own and charge the French line.

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.

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

It did no good to tell himself that it was all in his head if it went on happening anyway. His belief was not required; his disbelief of was no consequence.

Book burners! I'll cut off your balls and rape your women!

Money he didn't have, but fuck it, that was the easiest kind to spend - and

If you hated someone, she was at least worthy of your passion. He

There are no unselfish acts. When people do something for someone else, it's always for their own personal psychological reasons.

He understood that the ghost existed first and foremost within his own head. That maybe ghosts always haunted minds, not places.

Some things you didn't give away, no matter how much you owed.

AROUND FIFTY-EIGHT THOUSAND NONFAMILY CHILD ABDUCTIONS occur each year in America,

There's only room for one hero in this story-and everyone knows the devil doesn't get to be the good guy.

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.

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.

Who knows what may lie around the next corner? There may be a window somewhere ahead. It may look out on a field of sunflowers.

In the winter, when you're cold, the world extends no more than a foot in any direction.

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.

There are two infections running rampant. One is the Dragonscale, and the other is panic.

The Devil and woman have been allies against God from the beginning, ever since Satan first came to the first man in the form of a snake and whispered to Adam that true happiness was not to be found in prayer but in Eve's cunt.

The pills I take are a paperweight. All they do is pin the fantasies down. But they're still there, and any strong wind that comes along, I can feel them rattling around, trying to slip free.

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.

Some part of her felt that the existence of the bridge depended utterly on forward motion and not thinking too much.

No. You can't understand. Because you're reading the last chapter of something without having read the first chapter. You're a little guy, Bode. Kids always think they're coming into a story at the beginning, when they're usually coming in at the end.

What frightened him was not the thought that he was a prisoner of Charlie Manx but that for a moment he had forgotten he was a prisoner. For a moment he had been admiring the light and feeling almost happy.

The snowmen stood in bunches, in families, and the breeze generated by the car snatched at their striped scarves. Snowmen fathers and snowgirl mothers with their snowchildren and snowpuppies. Top hats were in abundance, as were corncob pipes and carrot noses. They waved the crooked sticks of their arms, saluting Mr. Manx, Wayne, and NOS4A2 as they went by. The black coals of their eyes gleamed, darker than the night, brighter than the stars.

You ever find a cat sleeping in a ray of sun? There's a sound over there. It's a golden sound. That's the only way to describe it. It's a bright sound, and it has little flecks of music in it, drifting like motes of dust. And you just know if you let that sound get inside you, if you hummed along with it, you'd rest like a cat in the sun. A perfect rest. You could rest a billion years.

So for online people, death doesn't happen. People go online to hide from death and wind up hiding from life.

every fictional world was a work of fantasy, and whenever writers introduce a threat or a conflict into their story, they create the possibility of horror. He had been drawn to horror fiction, he said, because it took the most basic elements of literature and pushed them to their extremes. All fiction was make-believe, which made fantasy more valid (and honest) than realism. He

In a lot of ways, I guess Satan was the first superhero." "Don't you mean supervillain?" "Nah. Hero, for sure. Think about it. In his first adventure, he took the form of a snake to free two prisoners being held naked in a Third World jungle prison by an all-powerful megalomaniac. At the same time, he broadened their diet and introduced them to their own sexuality. Sounds kind of like a cross between Animal Man and Dr. Phil to me." She

Gail looked out at the water, wanting to hear it again, that soft foghorn sound, and she did, but it was inside her this time, the sound was down deep inside her, a long wordless cry for things that weren't never going to happen.

Eddie Carroll had just come in from outside, and read Noonan's letter standing in the mudroom. He flipped to the beginning of the story. He stood reading for almost five minutes before noticing he was uncomfortably warm. He tossed his jacket at a hook and wandered into the kitchen.

He sat for a while on the stairs to the second floor, turning through the pages. Then he was stretched on the couch in his office, head on a pile of books, reading in a slant of late October light, with no memory of how he had got there.

He rushed through to the ending, then sat up, in the grip of a strange, bounding exuberance. He thought it was possibly the rudest, most awful thing he had ever read, and in his case that was saying something. He had waded through the rude and awful for most of his professional life, and in those fly-blown and diseased literary swamps had discovered flowers of unspeakable beauty, of which he was sure this was one. It was cruel and perverse and he had to have it. He turned to the beginning and started reading again.

("Best New Horror")

Death and ruin is man's preferred ecosystem.

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

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

We had almost exactly a year together as a couple after that. She wanted to swim the Great Barrier Reef. I wish we had gone. I wish we had read books to each other. We had one weekend of sexy-times in New York City while her father looked after the kids. I wish we'd had more. I wish we'd walked more. I wish we hadn't sat in front of the TV so much. It was nice, we cuddled, we laughed at Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers, but it didn't make much in the way of memories. We did such ordinary, banal things. Ordered pizza and played Trivial Pursuit with her sister and her dad. Helped the kids with homework. We did dishes together more than we ever made love. What kind of life is that?"
"Real life," Harper said.

The road will make me better. The road always does.

You're useful to me. Every day. Every hour. Anyone who knows how to love is useful to someone.

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.

In a friendship, especially in a friendship between two young boys, you are allowed to inflict a certain amount of pain. This is even expected. But you must cause no serious injury; you must never, under any circumstances, leave wounds that will result in permanent scars.

Not that they were married. They never would've married. All firemen are wedded to cinders, in the end.

God loves man, we are told, but love must be proved by facts, not reasons. If you were in a boat and did not save a drowning man, you would burn in Hell for certain; yet God, in His wisdom, feels no need to use His power to save anyone from a single moment of suffering, and in spite of his inaction He is celebrated and revered.

A flock isn't such a bad thing if you belong, but a few hundred starlings will tear an unlucky martin to feathers if it crosses their path.

Keys turn both ways. You can lock something away ... But you can also throw a bolt and set something free.

In her experience it was very difficult to offer a man affection and kindness without giving him the impression you were also offering a lay.

Boy, this is your lucky day!" She clapped her hands. "You found yourself a librarian! I can help wit the figuring-out thing and point you toward some good poetry while I'm at it. It's what I do.

As a world of shared ideas, Twitter is a kind of Inscape in and of itself, and a good one.

A thin gold chain glittered at his throat.