410 Quotes by Joe Hill

Silence is the purest form of harmony.

As a school nurse, she had always modeled herself on Mary Poppins, aiming for an air of good-tempered calm, self-assurance, a tolerance for play, but an expectation that the medicine would go down along with the spoonful of sugar. If the kids thought it was possible she might break into song and shoot fireworks from the tip of her umbrella, that was all right with her. Such.

Getting old is no way to stop being young.

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 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.

It’s quite common to enter a library and find yourself in conversation with the dead. The best minds of generations long gone crowd every bookshelf. They wait there to be noticed, to be addressed, and to reply in turn. In the library the dead meet the living on collegial terms as a matter of course, every day.

You’re guileless, Lou. That’s one of the reasons I love you.” He lifted his head and gave her a wondering stare. “I do, you know,” she said. “It’s not your fault I made such a rotten mess of everything. It’s not your fault I’m such a colossal fuckup.” Lou bowed his head and considered this. “Aren’t you going to tell me I’m not so bad?” she asked. “Mmm-no. I was thinking how every man loves a hot girl with a history of making mistakes. Because it’s always possible she’ll make one with you.

It sounded like delusion until you remembered that 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.

He had always known he would go out this way: on fire. He had always known that rage was flammable, dangerous to store under pressure, where he had kept it his whole life.