Quotes from NOS4A2

Joe Hill ·  692 pages

Rating: (66.7K votes)


“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



About the author

Joe Hill
Born place: in Bangor, Maine, The United States
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“We did as we were told, staying outdoors, and not bothering Jeremy and Peter. Yet that could be
done while sitting outside the study window, where we could listen to the conversation within.
Kids who don’t eavesdrop on adult conversations are doomed to a childhood of ignorance.
Of what I heard that afternoon, I understood only one key point: that Peter was leaving the Pack.
Why he was leaving, what that meant for his life, how difficult that decision was for him to
make, all that I wouldn’t fully understand for years to come. From the tone of the conversation,
though, I knew that this decision marked the end of a long personal struggle with the issue of
Pack-hood. I knew too that this was a decision Jeremy had both known and feared was coming.
Roughly half of all Pack youth left the group in their early twenties. It was like membership in any regimented segment of human society—children stay with the group because they have to, then when they hit adulthood, they realize that they have a choice. Some, like Antonio, chafe at the rules, but not enough to consider leaving. Some, like Jeremy, disagree with many of the principles, but believe in the institution itself enough to stay and try to effect change from within. Others look around and say ‘”I don’t belong here”, and this was the case with Peter.”
― Kelley Armstrong, quote from Men of the Otherworld


“THE GIRL WAS TWENTY-THREE POUNDS OF NO! NO, BED! NO, SLEEP! No, no, no!”
― Tess Gerritsen, quote from Ice Cold


“Janie blinks and leans against the wall, just in case.
But it's no one's dream.
It's just the end of some things.
And the beginning of others.”
― Lisa McMann, quote from Fade


“So what was in this building before historical materialism?'

'Before what?'

'You know, back then, under the old regime?'

'Oh. Under the old regime my master lived here.'

'A bourgeois?'

'You're a bourgeois yourself! He wasn't a bourgeois. He was a marshal of the nobility.'

'So he was a proletarian, then?'

'You're a proletarian yourself! I told you loud and clear, a marshal.'

The conversation with the clever dvornik with a vague understanding of the class structure of society would have lasted god knows how long if the young man hadn't made a decisive move.”
― Ilya Ilf, quote from The Twelve Chairs


“Reality should follow through on what I think it is going to do.”
― Allie Brosh, quote from Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened


Interesting books

When We Collide
(8.2K)
When We Collide
by A.L. Jackson
Kaleidoscope
(19.1K)
Kaleidoscope
by Kristen Ashley
The Meursault Investigation
(4.3K)
The Meursault Invest...
by Kamel Daoud
Portrait in Death
(28K)
Portrait in Death
by J.D. Robb
Undead and Unpopular
(17.1K)
Undead and Unpopular
by MaryJanice Davidson
Love Is a Mix Tape
(25.8K)
Love Is a Mix Tape
by Rob Sheffield

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters 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.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.