410 Quotes by Joe Hill

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.

They led me into things that I regretted in the moment but were later a pleasure to remember. Real sin, I think, produces the same emotions, in the exact opposite order.

The key is to keep things simple.

But before that there’d been summer days in the barn while he rebuilt the Mustang. There’d been John Prine on the radio, the sweet smell of hay baking in the heat, and afternoons filled with her lazy, pointless questions – a never-ending interrogation that was, at turns, tiresome, amusing, and erotic. There’d been her body, tattooed and icy white, with the bony knees and skinny thighs of a long-distance runner. There’d been her breath on his neck.

It was perhaps, the devil’s oldest precept, that sin could always be trusted to reveal what was most human in a person as often for good as for ill.

When it came to producing a state of focus, quiet contentment, and inner peace, Zen meditation ran a very distant second to caffeine.

I have to tell you, heroin dealers and meth slingers have made your country a wretched place to be a simple, honest drug dealer who wants to give his customers a lovingly curated experience.

I was less a social butterfly than a social death’s-head moth.

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.