Joe Hill Quotes

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

“Was there any human urge more pitiful-or more intense- than wanting another chance at something?”

“She'd thought love had something to do with happiness, but it turned out they were not even vaguely related. Love was closer to a need, no different from the need to eat, to breathe.”

“Pick a sin we can both live with, is what I ask.”

“Because love requires context.”

“Why is there evil in the world? Because sometimes you just wanna fuckin have it, and you don’t care who gets hurt.”

“I hope if there is another world, we will not be judged too harshly for the things we did wrong here—that we will at least be forgiven for the mistakes we made out of love.”

“But God fears women even more that He fears the devil- and is right to. She, with her power to bring life into the world, was truly made in the image of the Creator, not man.”

“It was like wondering how evil had come into the world or what happens to a person after he dies: an interesting philosophical exercise, but also curiously pointless, since evil and death happened, regardless of the why and the how and what-it-meant.”

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

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

“I want you to remember what was good in me, not what was most awful. The people you love should be allowed to keep their worst to themselves.”

“The best way to get even with anyone is to put them in the rearview mirror on your way to something better.”

“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.”

“Maybe all the schemes of the devil were nothing compared to what man could think up.”

“Taking a thing apart is always faster than putting something together. This is true of everything except marriage.”

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

“When you think about it, most of the good ideas came along to make sin a whole lot easier.”

“Horror was rooted in sympathy… in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst.”

“I am; I was. I want to be.”

“The blood of a redheaded woman is three degrees cooler than the blood of a normal woman. This has been established by medical studies.”

“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.”

“Gold don't come off. What's good stays good no matter how much of a beating it takes.”

“What a blessed if painful thing, this business of being alive.”

“The difference between childhood and adulthood, Vic had come to believe, was the difference between imagination and resignation. You traded one for the other and lost your way.”

“No one looks too closely at a librarian. People are afraid of going blind from the glare of-ssso much compressed wisdom.”

“Innocence ain't all it's cracked up to be, you know. Innocent little kids rip the wings off flies, because they don't know any better. innocence.”

“It's like in the Bible. You can't always get what you want, but if you really need something, you usually find it."
"What part of the Bible is that from?" Ig asked her. "The Gospel of Keith Richards?”

“… people made the imaginary real all the time: taking the music they heard in their head and recording it, seeing a house in their imagination and building it. Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.”

“Him and God are supposed to be at war with each other. But if God hates sin and Satan punishes the sinners, aren’t they working the same side of the street? Aren’t the judge and the executioner on the same team?”

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

“Already, though, she understood the difference between being a child and being an adult. The difference is when someone says he can keep the bad things away, a child believes him.”

“The language of sin was universal, the original Esperanto.”

“She liked things that had been written by people who had lived short, ugly, and tragic lives. Or, who at least, were English.”

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

“I don't know, maybe you'd be more interested in me if I were a book.”

“You loved me as hard as you knew how. I'd give anything to go back and love you better…”

“If you didn't have me to rake you over the coals now and then, there wouldn't be any fire in your life at all.”

“I will be waiting by candlelight in our tree house of the mind.”

“Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be kicked in the nuts as soon as they try to get back up. That wasn’t in the Bible, but maybe it should’ve been.”

“And he paddled away in his douche canoe.”

“To be honest, I think cell phones were invented by the devil.”

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

“I'm not questioning your bravery. I'm questioning your intelligence.”

“I'll take the shooting. I'm used to that. I've been shot a few times in the past, and I guess I can stand it, again.”

“Goodbye Bill. I die like a true blue rebel. Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize.”

“Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right;
But when asked how 'bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:

You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.”

“I die with a clear conscience, I die fighting, not like a coward.”

“My will is easy to decide,
For there is nothing to divide.
My kin don't need to fuss and moan —
"Moss does not cling to a rolling stone."

My body? — Oh! — If I could choose,
I would to ashes it reduce,
And let the merry breezes blow
My dust to where some flowers grow.

Perhaps some fading flower then
Would come to life and bloom again.
This is my last and final will.
Good luck to all of you. [Joe Hill]”

“Workingmen of all countries, unite,
Side by side we for freedom will fight:
When the world and its wealth we have gained
To the grafters we'll sing this refrain:

You will eat, bye and bye,
When you've learned how to cook and to fry
Chop some wood, 'twill do you good,
And you'll eat in the sweet bye and bye.”

“There is pow'r, there is pow'r
In a band of workingmen.
When they stand hand in hand,
That's a pow'r, that's a pow'r
That must rule in every land —
One Industrial Union Grand.”

“A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over. And I maintain that if a person can put a few common sense facts into a song and dress them up in a cloak of humor, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read.”

“Workers of the world awaken. Break your chains, demand your rights.
All the wealth you make is taken, by exploiting parasites.
Shall you kneel in deep submission from your cradle to your grave?
Is the height of your ambition to be a good and willing slave?”