Quotes from Heart-Shaped Box

“Horror was rooted in sympathy . . . in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“All the world is made of music. We are all strings on a lyre. We resonate. We sing together.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“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.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“You want sympathy, go fuck James Taylor.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“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.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“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.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“If hell was anything, it was talk radio — and family.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“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.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“When you were a Goth, it was important to at least imply the possibility you might burst into flames in direct sunlight.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“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.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“I feel bad for her. It's not a lot of fun, you know."
"What?"
"Being in love with you. I've been with a lot of bad guys who made me feel lousy about myself, Jude, but you're something special. Because I knew none of them really cared about me, but you do, and you make me feel like your shitty hooker anyway.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“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.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“Prison didn't frighten him especially. He had a lot of fans in there.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“I’ve always thought that when something really bad happens to a person, other people just have to know about it. You can’t be a tree falling in the woods with no one to hear you crash.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“She’d done things to him he thought only happened to characters in country-western songs, laying waste to his car, his dogs, driving him from his home, and making an outlaw of him. It was almost funny.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“The dead win when you quit singing and let them take you on down the road with them.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“A lot of his songs, when they started out, sounded like old music. They arrived on his doorstep, wandering orphans, the lost children of large and venerable musical families. They came to him in the form of Tin Pan Alley sing-alongs, honky-tonk blues, Dust Bowl plaints, lost Chuck Berry riffs. Jude dressed them in black and taught them to scream.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“He understood that the ghost existed first and foremost within his own head. That maybe ghosts always haunted minds, not places.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“It was hard to venture back near the place you’d been bred without settling into the characteristics of the person you’d been there.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“The dead pull the living down.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“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.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“Jude wondered if the chip was smart enough to tell the difference between a dog and a naked psychotic scrambling around on all fours with a knife in his teeth.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“His father had smashed his very first guitar for him, in an early attempt to rid Jude of his musical ambitions. Jude hadn’t been able to repeat the act himself, not even onstage, for show, when he could afford all the guitars he wanted. He was, however, perfectly willing to use one as a weapon to defend himself. In a sense he supposed he had always used them as weapons.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“Джуд подозираше, че в действителност Дани няма никакви музикални предпочитания и радиото е просто за фон, нещо като звуков еквивалент на тапетите.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“Why do you got to ask so many damn questions?” he wanted to know. As they went back out into the rain, he opened his black duster and closed it over her thin, shivering body, clasped her against him. “I’d rather ask questions,” she said, “than answer them.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“When he was on the road, or recording, he had become accustomed to rolling into bed at five in the morning and sleeping through most of the daylight hours, but staying up all night had never come naturally. On the road, he would wake at four in the afternoon, bad-tempered and headachy, confused about where the time had gone. Everyone he knew would seem to him clever imposters, unfeeling aliens wearing rubber skin and the faces of friends. It took a liberal quantity of alcohol to make them seem like themselves again.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“burn it.’ Jude felt, for an instant, an almost overpowering impulse to do just that, find some lighter fluid, douse it, cook it in the driveway. It was an impulse he immediately mistrusted, wary of any irrevocable action. Who knew what bridges might be burned along with it? He felt the slightest flicker of an idea, something about the awful-smelling suit and how it might be of use, but the thought drifted away before he could fix on it. He was tired. It was hard to pin a solid thought in place. His reasons for wanting to hold on to the suit were illogical, superstitious, unclear even to himself, but when he spoke, he had a perfectly reasonable explanation for keeping it. ‘We can’t burn it. It’s evidence. My lawyer is going to want it later, if we decide to build a case against her.’ Georgia laughed, weakly, unhappily. ‘What? Assault with a deadly spirit?”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“In truth, Jude suspected that Danny had no particular musical preferences, no strong likes or dislikes, and that the radio was just background sound, the auditory equivalent of wallpaper.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

“He searched the ground floor and found only shadow and stillness, which should’ve reassured him but didn’t. It was the wrong kind of stillness, the shocked stillness that follows the bang of a cherry bomb. His eardrums throbbed from the pressure of all that quiet, a dreadful silence.”
― Joe Hill, quote from Heart-Shaped Box

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