Full Throttle Quotes

“It’s quite common to enter a library and find yourself in conversation with the dead. The best minds of generations long gone crowd every bookshelf. They wait there to be noticed, to be addressed, and to reply in turn. In the library the dead meet the living on collegial terms as a matter of course, every day.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“The price of being alive is that someday you aren’t.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“The child outliving the parents is the only happy story us human beings get.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“I remember Aslan dead on the stone and the mice nibbling at the ropes that bound his corpse. I think that provided me with my foundational sense of decency. To live a decent life is to be no more than a mouse nibbling at a rope. One mouse isn’t much, but if enough of us keep chewing, we may set something free that can save us from the worst. Maybe it will even save us from ourselves.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“And you're not an envoy from the lord?" "You're not an angel?" "Nope. Just a librarian." Aw, well, she said, "That's close enough for me." ~Full Throttle by Joe Hill”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“If you Google “How do I write a book?” you’ll get a million hits, but here’s the dirty secret: It’s just math. It’s not even hard math—it’s first-grade addition. Write three pages a day, every day. In a hundred days, you’ll have three hundred pages. Type “The End.” Done.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“I'd netted a bachelor's in English from Boston University, but it had done less for me, in strictly financial terms, than the eight-week course that earned me a commercial driver's license.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“For me, a lifelong bookworm, there was nothing quite so awful as the thought of dying fifty pages from the end of a good novel.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“They led me into things that I regretted in the moment but were later a pleasure to remember. Real sin, I think, produces the same emotions, in the exact opposite order.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“The past is always close, so close you can sing along with it, anytime you like.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“Some work is about lying down for others, I suppose,” he says, and she realizes he is leaping up the last flight of stairs to a wide black glass landing and another set of bronze doors. “And some work is about lifting people up.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“The best works of art have a tendency to fall through time differently than human beings. They remember, but they also anticipate. A good piece can mean different things to different people at different times, and all of those meanings are true, even if they contradict one another.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“It's quite common to enter a library and find yourself in conversation with the dead. The best minds of generations long gone crowd every bookshelf.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“To be a human being is to be a tourist in a cold, unfriendly, and ancient country. Like all tourists we hope for a lark... a few laughs, a bit of adventure, a roll in the hay. But it's so easy to get lost. The day ends so quickly, and the roads are so confusing, and there are things out there in the dark with teeth. To survive we might have to show some teeth of our own.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“I also still believe that books operate along the same principles as enchanted wardrobes. You climb into that little space and come out on the other side in a vast and secret world, a place both more frightening and more wonderful than your own.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“stared at the herd, and they stared back. One of them stood in profile to the house, half a ton of horse. The scars scrawled across his side looked like they might be a decade old, not a few hours, but for all that, they were quite distinct, in silver relief against his fine white hair. Hacked there in the horse’s flesh were the words FUCK YOU. They whinnied together, the pack of them. It sounded like laughter.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“And you're not an envoy from the Lord? You're not an angel?'
'Nope. Just a librarian.'
'Ah, well,' she said. 'That's close enough for me.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“(Ahem, this is your cue to visit the Web sites for PS Publishing, Cemetery Dance Publications, and Subterranean Press”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“Your mother had peculiar ideas, and she tried to drown them with drink. In the end she only drowned herself.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“His first wife said it made him look like Jack Nicholson with the ax in that movie.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“In the Man Mall there’s a shop that sells fireworks, another that sells guns, a liquor store, a tattoo parlor, and an adult-toy shop with a peep show in the back. With forty dollars in your pocket, you can hit the Man Mall on a Friday night, get shitfaced, get blown by a stripper, get her name tattooed on your arm, celebrate by launching a bottle rocket over the interstate, and pick up a .38 so you’ll have an easy way to kill yourself in the morning.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“Ancient religions used to tell people that letting go of yearning is the highest form of spirituality. But Buddha had it wrong. Yearning is the difference between being human and being a Clockwork. Not to want is not to live. Even DNA is an engine of desire—driven to copy itself over and over.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“Did he finish reading The Hunger Games before his heart gave out? I hoped so. For me, a lifelong bookworm, there was nothing quite so awful as the thought of dying fifty pages from the end of a good novel.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“A book of stories isn’t a novel and can’t have the simple narrative drive of a novel. I think it should still try to have a feeling of progression, of connectedness. It’s like a road trip. You’re staying in a different inn every night:”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“I’m surprised you could get in,” says the big man. “They’ve got to draft a certain number of unqualified inner-city kids to meet their quota. That means a lot less space for people like you.” “People like what?” Fidelman asks, enunciating slowly and deliberately. People. Like. What? Nearly fifty years of being gay has taught Fidelman that it is a mistake to let certain statements pass unchallenged.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“Come on now, Mr. Gallagher. We turned the sound off for you. The bad woman can’t hurt you. We’ll keep you safe from all her reason and science and compassion.” “Just keep your back turned,” Loren Hayes added. “If you look at her, there’s the very real possibility you might catch a glimpse of empathy and it’ll give you a sour tummy.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“In the library the dead meet the living on collegial terms as a matter of course, every day.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“There was a great pirate ship that swung back and forth like a pendulum, sailing high out over the sides of the pier and the ocean beyond, while shrill screams carried into the night. I thought of that ride as the SS Fuck No.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“Christian had settled in one of the camp chairs with his drawing pad but leaped up to study a cobweb in a high shadowed corner. The spider had spun a few words into the web: FREE BED FOR FLYS”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle

“Miriam sang, “Gail, Gail, she bosses everyone around. Gail, Gail, she is really stupid.” The melody was just as good as the lyrics.”
― Joe Hill, Full Throttle