Joe Hill Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

And he paddled away in his douche canoe.

I mean, when the world comes for your children, with the knives out, it's your job to stand in the way.

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.

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.

Music [is] the third rail of life. You grabbed it to shock yourself out of the dull drag of hours. To feel something. To burn with all the emotions you didn't get to experience in the ordinary run of school, TV, and loading the dishwasher after dinner.

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.

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

You'll have pie in the sky when you die.

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

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.

That was one thing you found out when you were stoned, or wasted, or feverish: that the world was always turning and that only a healthy mind could block out the sickening whirl of it.

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

Sooner or later a black car came for everyone.

The language of sin was universal, the original Esperanto.

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.

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

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

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.

If the workers took a notion they could stop all speeding trains; every ship upon the ocean they can tie with mighty chains.

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

Work and pray, live on hay, youll get pie in the sky when you die.

I will die like a true-blue rebel. Don't waste any time in mourning - organize.

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.

The mad sometimes drilled holes in their own heads to let the demons out. To relieve the pressure of thoughts they could no longer bear. Jude understood the impulse. Each beat of his heart was a fresh and staggering blow felt in the nerves behind his eyes and in his temples. Punishing evidence of life.

He understood that the ghost existed first and foremost within his own head. That maybe ghosts always haunted minds, not places. If he wanted to take a shot at it, he’d have to turn the barrel against his own temple.

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.

I have nothing to say for myself, only that I have always tried to make this earth a little bit better

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Terror is the desire to save your own ass, but horror is rooted in sympathy.

I guess Satan was the first superhero [...] 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.

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

I felt like it needed some color down there, so I painted the walls with the motherfucker.

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. That’s innocence

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

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

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

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.