“There's something horribly unfair about dying in the middle of a good story, before you have a chance to see how it all comes out. Of course, I suppose everyone ALWAYS dies in the middle of a good story, in a sense. Your own story. Or the story of your grandchildren. Death is a raw deal for narrative junkies.”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“Your personality is not just a matter of what you know about yourself, but what others know about you. You are one person with your mother, and another with your lover, and yet another with your child. Those other people create you--finish you--as much as you create you. When you're gone, the ones you've left behind get to keep the same part of you they always had.”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“It’s so fucking cheap when people say I love you. It’s a name to stick on a surge of hormones, with a little hint of loyalty thrown in. I’ve never liked saying it. Here’s what I say: We’re together, now and until the end. You have everything I need to be happy. You make me feel right.”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“Death is a raw deal for narrative junkies.”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“There’s something horribly unfair about dying in the middle of a good story, before you have a chance to see how it all comes out.”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“The people in charge can always justify doing terrible things in the name of the greater good. A slaughter here, a little torture there. It becomes moral to do things that would be immoral if an ordinary individual did ’em.”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“You know, we might’ve fucked up the planet, sucking out all the oil, melting the ice caps, allowing ska music to flourish, but we made Coca-Cola, so goddamn it, people weren’t all bad.”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“Sometimes I think every man wants to be a writer. They want to invent a world with the perfect imaginary woman, someone they can boss around and undress at will. They can work out their own aggressions with a few fictional rape scenes. Then they can send their fictional surrogate in to save her, a white knight – or a fireman! Someone with all the power and all the agency. Real women, on the other hand, have all these tiresome interests of their own, and won’t follow an outline.”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“Someone probably a lot smarter than me said hell is other people. I say you’re in hell when you don’t give to someone who needs, because you can’t bear to have less. What you are giving away then is your own soul.”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“There are no unselfish acts. When people do something for someone else, it’s always for their own personal psychological reasons.”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“Your impulse to protect me conflicts with my need to protect my self-respect. Sorry. Besides. I have this vaguely uneasy feeling you're offering to protect me from you. That's not doing me a kindness -- that's coercion.”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“Harper thought it would be a toss-up, which term for women she hated more: bitch or hen. A hen was something you kept in a cage, and her sole worth was in her eggs. A bitch, at least, had teeth.”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“You could just tell she was the best kind of trouble.”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“The first few days, the worst thing he seen Harold do was take a dump and use the pages from one of the camp library books for toilet paper.
Renée wined. “It turned out to be The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Our only copy. If I had known what he was going to do with it, I would’ve given him a copy of Atlas Shrugged.”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“She came back from the eighties to save mankind. Martha Quinn is our only hope.”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“I am always with you. Love never burns away. It just keeps on and on.”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“Humanity is a germ that thrives on the very edge of catastrophe.”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“Death and ruin is man's preferred ecosystem.”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“There's something horribly unfair about dying in the middle of a good story, before you have a chance to see how it all comes out. Of course, I suppose everyone always dies in the middle of a good story, in a sense. Your own story. Or the story of your children. Or your grandchildren. Death is a raw deal for narrative junkies.”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“FOX said the Dragon had been set loose by ISIS, using spores that had been invented by the Russians in the 1980s. MSNBC said sources indicated the ’scale might’ve been created by engineers at Halliburton and stolen by culty Christian types fixated on the Book of Revelation. CNN reported both sides.”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“Americans curse without any imagination at all.” Harper”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“Just a lot of ‘fuck fuck fuck’ over and over again? Can’t you expand your range a little? Goddamn bloody arsefoam. Daddy drilling Mommy on the kitchen table. That sort of thing. Americans curse without any imagination at all.”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“Arson is almost as good as Prozac.”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“This reminds me: Are you going to eat the placenta?” Renée asked Harper. “I understand that’s a thing now. We stocked a pregnancy guide at the bookstore with a whole chapter of placenta recipes in the back. Omelets and pasta sauces and so on.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Harper said. “Dining on the placenta smacks of cannibalism, and I was hoping for a more dignified apocalypse.”
“Rabbit mothers eat their own babies,” the Mazz said. “I found that out reading Watership Down. Apparently the mamas chow on their newborns all the time. Pop them down just like little meat Skittles.”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“Most people have no idea how much of themselves they store off-site. Your personality is not just a matter of what you know about yourself, but what others know about you. You are one person with your mother, and another with your lover, and yet another with your child. Those other people create you—finish you—as much as you create you. When you’re gone, the ones you’ve left behind get to keep the same part of you they always had.” She”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“He went on, “I don’t know how much time we have left. Could be fifty years. Could be one more week. But I do know that we’re not going to get cheated out of one second of being together. We’re going to share everything and feel everything together. And I am going to let you know, in the way I touch you, and the way I kiss you”—as he said it, he touched her, and kissed her—“that you are the best thing in my life. And I’m a selfish man, and I want every inch of you, and every minute of your life I can have. There’s no my life anymore. And no your life. Just our life, and we’re going to have it our way. I want birthday cake every day and you naked in bed every night. And when it’s time to be done, we’ll have that our way, too.”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“Harper Grayson had seen lots of people burn on TV, everyone had, but the first person she saw burn for real was in the playground behind the school. Schools”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
“Someone probably a lot smarter than me said hell is other people. I say you're in hell when you don't give to someone who needs, because you can't bear to have less.”
― Joe Hill, quote from The Fireman
Joe Hill
Born place: in Bangor, Maine, The United States
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“This is how tyrants win the will of the people: with lies.”
― Terry Goodkind, quote from Soul of the Fire
“He had told us then that most of us would die violently, and those who did not would be brought down to the level of beasts. Told us that there was no other choice but to run and run. That he was living testimony of someone who should have run. That in him—he did not say all this, but we felt it—there was nothing but hatred for himself as well as contempt for us. He hated himself for the mixture of his blood and the cowardice of his being, and he hated us for daily reminding him of it. No, he did not tell us this, but daily he showed us this. As clearly as anything, he showed his hatred for himself, and for us. He could teach any of us only one thing, and that one thing was flight. Because there was no freedom here. He said it, and he didn’t say it. But we felt it. When we told our people how we felt, they told us to go back and learn all we could. There were those who did go back to learn. Others who only went back. And having no place to run, they went into the fields; others went into the small towns and cities, seeking work, and did even worse.”
― Ernest J. Gaines, quote from A Lesson Before Dying
“I want my own books to have their own shelves," you said, and that's how I knew it would be okay to live together.”
― David Levithan, quote from The Lover's Dictionary
“But when Bethany came into class, her dark hair pulled back into a low ponytail, showing off her graceful neck, he may have stopped breathing again. A thousand charming words strung together in his head in a nanosecond, but he averted his eyes to his empty notebook. Notes? Who really took notes in class? Dawson wanted to see if she would talk to him first. God, he was like a teenage girl. He was so screwed.”
― Jennifer L. Armentrout, quote from Shadows
“You wives with your certificates for loving.”
― Nancy Horan, quote from Loving Frank
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