He believed in his own decency with all his heart. So it was with every true monster, Vic supposed.

— Joe Hill

He'd possessed all the key elements of a school shooter: hormones, misery, ammunition. People wondered how something like Columbine could happen. Jude wondered why it didn't happen more often.

— Joe Hill

He got up and ran on, pitching himself down the hill, flying through the branches of the firs, leaping roots and rocks without seeing them. As he went, the hill got steeper and steeper, until it was really like falling. He was going too fast, and he knew when he came to a stop, it would involve crashing into something, and shattering pain. Only as he went on, picking up speed all the time, until with each leap he seemed to sail through yards of darkness, he felt a giddy surge of emotion, a sensation that might have been panic but felt strangely like exhilaration. He felt as if at any moment his feet might leave the ground and never come back down. He knew this forest, this darkness, this night. Furthermore, he knew his chances: not good. Furthermore, he knew what was after him. It had been after him all his life. He knew where he was - in a story about to unfold an ending. He knew better than anyone how these stories went, and if anyone could find their way out of these woods, it was him.("Best New Horror")

— Joe Hill

He had been a demon for just two days, but the time when he knew what it was like to be loved seemed to exist in a hazily recalled past, to have been left behind long ago.

— Joe Hill

He had no doubt that Merlin had called out to God here in this place while she was raped and killed, in her heart if not with her voice. God's reply had been that due to the high volume of calls she could expect to be on hold until she was dead.

— Joe Hill

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

He paused, twisting his goatee, considering the law in Deuteronomy that forbade clothes with mixed fibers. A problematic bit of Scripture. A matter that required thought. "Only the devil wants man to have a wide range of lightweight and comfortable styles to choose from," he murmured at last, trying out a new proverb. "Although there may be no forgiveness for polyester. On this one matter, Satan and the Lord are in agreement.

— Joe Hill

Horror was rooted in sympathy. . . In understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst.

— Joe Hill

Humanity is worse than flies.

— Joe Hill

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. What the girls on the butts and send them off to their tricks as fast and often as I can.

— Joe Hill