“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.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“Was there any human urge more pitiful-or more intense- than wanting another chance at something?”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“I felt like it needed some color down there, so I painted the walls with the motherfucker.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“The blood of a redheaded woman is three degrees cooler than the blood of a normal woman. This has been established by medical studies.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“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.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“Gold don't come off. What's good stays good no matter how much of a beating it takes.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“What a blessed if painful thing, this business of being alive.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“No one looks too closely at a librarian. People are afraid of going blind from the glare of ssss-ssso much compressed wisdom.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“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.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“Everyone lives in two worlds,” Maggie said, speaking in an absentminded sort of way while she studied her letters. “There’s the real world, with all its annoying facts and rules. In the real world, there are things that are true and things that aren’t. Mostly the real world s-s-s-suh-sucks. But everyone also lives in the world inside their own head. An inscape, a world of thought. In a world made of thought—in an inscape—every idea is a fact. Emotions are as real as gravity. Dreams are as powerful as history. Creative people, like writers, and Henry Rollins, spend a lot of their time hanging out in their thoughtworld. S-s-strong creatives, though, can use a knife to cut the stitches between the two worlds, can bring them together. Your bike. My tiles. Those are our knives.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“The difference between childhood and adulthood, Vic had come to believe, was the difference between imagination and resignation. You traded one for the other and lost your way.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“... 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.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“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.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“I don't know, maybe you'd be more interested in me if I were a book.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“You loved me as hard as you knew how. I'd give anything to go back and love you better...”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“And he paddled away in his douche canoe.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“To be honest, I think cell phones were invented by the devil.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“You can't let facts get in the way of the truth.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“Sooner or later a black car came for everyone.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“If books were girls and reading was s-ss-ssss-fucking, this would be the biggest whorehouse in the county and I'd be the most ruthless pimp you ever met. Whap the girls on the butts and send them off to their tricks as fast and often as I can.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“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.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“Men, she thought, were one of the world's few sure comforts, like a fire on a cold October night, like cocoa, like broken-in-slippers. Their clumsy affections, their bristly faces, and their willingness to do what needed to be done - cook an omelette, change lightbulbs, make with hugging - sometimes almost made being a woman fun.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“You had to know when it made sense to try to untangle something and when to just cut the motherfucker loose.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“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.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“She just knew that even when you had nothing, you still had love.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“Vic’s father was badass. Other dads built things. Hers blew shit up and rode away on a Harley, smoking the cigarette he used to light the fuse. Top that.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“Everyone you lost was still there with you, and so maybe no one was ever lost at all.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“If you’re going to be mad, she heard her father say, then use it, and don’t be used by it.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
“She thought of mothering, which was really another word for being present and caring what happened to someone.”
― Joe Hill, quote from NOS4A2
Joe Hill
Born place: in Bangor, Maine, The United States
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“No," said Godfrey, with a keen decisiveness of tone, in contrast with his usually careless and unemphatic speech—"there's debts we can't pay like money debts, by paying extra for the years that have slipped by. While I've been putting off and putting off, the trees have been growing—it's too late now. Marner was in the right in what he said about a man's turning away a blessing from his door: it falls to somebody else.”
― George Eliot, quote from Silas Marner
“Gutman smiled benignly at him and said: “Well, Wilmer, I’m sorry indeed to lose you, and I want you to know that I couldn’t be any fonder of you if you were my own son; but—well, by Gad!—if you lose a son it’s possible to get another—and there’s only one Maltese falcon.”
― Dashiell Hammett, quote from The Maltese Falcon
“i feel like my life is so scattered right now. like it’s all these small pieces of paper and someone’s turned on the fan. but talking to you makes me feel like the fan’s been turned off for a little bit. like things could actually make sense. you completely unscatter me, and i appreciate that so much.”
― John Green, quote from Will Grayson, Will Grayson
“a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he's already got. He'll cling to trouble he's used to before he'll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from.”
― William Faulkner, quote from Light in August
“For him morality was neither conformism nor philosophic wisdom, but living the infinite fullness of possibilities. He believed in morality’s capacity for intensification, in stages of moral experience, and not merely, as most people do, in stages of moral understanding, as if it were something cut-and-dried for which people were just not pure enough. He believed in morality without believing in any specific moral system. Morality is generally understood to be a sort of police regulations for keeping life in order, and since life does not obey even these, they come to look as if they were really impossible to live up to and accordingly, in this sorry way, not really an ideal either. But morality must not be reduced to this level. Morality is imagination. This was what he wanted to make Agathe see. And his second point was: Imagination is not arbitrary. Once imagination is left to caprice, there is a price to pay.”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Man Without Qualities
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61 HoursBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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