Joe Hill

“Oh, now don't act like the idea is so terrible. When you come down to it, what could be more romantic than a few hours of scrambling around in a cold, dripping hole known for occasionally flooding and drowning people?”

“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.”

“I tell writers not to think about writing short stories or novels. Just write one good scene. And then a novel becomes a bunch of good scenes stacked on top of each other.”

“It was as if the room beyond the blast furnace was a tub and someone had turned the faucets on the cold and hot running snakes.”

“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.”

“Live pretty or die laughing, but don't you run. Don't you fucking run.”

“Scientists never study the important things. Like why some animals seem to have evolved the ability to gloat.”

“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?”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Джуд подозираше, че в действителност Дани няма никакви музикални предпочитания и радиото е просто за фон, нещо като звуков еквивалент на тапетите.”

“Terry is sure that Ig has never even kissed another girl, let alone fucked one, and he has wished for a while now that Iggy had more experience. Not because Terry didn't want his brother to be with Merrin, but because...well, because. Because love requires context. Because first relationships are by their very nature immature. So Merrin wanted them both to have a chance to grow up. So what?”

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

“I remember an era when you could get your nose sliced off for sticking it too far into another man's business. Now you can find out anything about anyone with the click of a button. There is no privacy and no consideration, and everyone is prying into things that aren't their affair. You can probably check on the intertube and find out what color underwear I have on today.”

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

“Don't believe everything you hear today”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“That's it? 'Damn, it smells like the fishsticks are burning and don't do that with your head, Bode?' What the fuck?”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“I am; I was. I want to be.”

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

“Love requires Context.”

“Prison didn't frighten him especially. He had a lot of fans in there.”

“I miss you, Jude. I'm looking forward to putting my arms around you. We're going to sing just like the old days. Everyone sings here. After a while it kind of sounds like screaming. Just listen. Listen and you can hear them screaming.”

“He had won it as a child, playing Scriptural Jeopardy in his Sunday-school class. When faced with answers from the Bible, Ig had all the right questions.”

“If hell was anything, it was talk radio — and family.”

“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.”

“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 soul may not be destroyed. The soul goes on forever. Like the number pi, it is without cessation or conclusion. Like pi it is a constant. Pi is an irrational number, incapable of being made into a fraction, impossible to divide from itself. So, too, the soul is an irrational, indivisible equation that perfectly expresses one thing: you.”

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

“You want sympathy, go fuck James Taylor.”

“He had tried to explain the way he felt to Danny once, about compulsive behavior and time rushing too fast and the Internet and drugs. Danny had only lifted one of his slender, mobile eyebrows and stared at him in smirking confusion. Danny did not think coke and computers were anything alike. But Jude had seen the way people hunched over their screens, clicking the refresh button again and again, waiting for some crucial if meaningless hit of information, and he thought it was almost exactly the same.”

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

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

“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.”

“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...”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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