Horns Joe Hill Quotes

The best way to get even with anyone is to put them in the rearview mirror on your way to something better.

You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know.

Maybe all the schemes of the devil were nothing compared to what man could think up.

It bewildered Ig, the idea that a person could not be interested in music. It was like not being interested in happiness.

I want you to remember what was good in me, not what was most awful. The people you love should be allowed to keep their worst to themselves.

I guess Satan was the first superhero [...] In his first adventure, he took the form of a snake to free two prisoners being held naked in a Third World jungle prison by an all-powerful megalomaniac. At the same time, he broadened their diet and introduced them to their own sexuality.

When you think about it, most of the good ideas came along to make sin a whole lot easier.

I mean, when the world comes for your children, with the knives out, it's your job to stand in the way.

I am; I was. I want to be.

Love requires Context.

There's only room for one hero in this story-and everyone knows the devil doesn't get to be the good guy.

I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. The author is unworthy of His own characters.

Pick a sin we can both live with, is what I ask.

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.

Music [is] the third rail of life. You grabbed it to shock yourself out of the dull drag of hours. To feel something. To burn with all the emotions you didn't get to experience in the ordinary run of school, TV, and loading the dishwasher after dinner.

The soul is an irrational, indivisible equation that perfectly expresses one thing: you. The soul would be no good to the devil if it could be destroyed. And it is not lost when placed in Satan's care, as is so often said. He always know exactly how to put his finger on it.

It's like in the Bible.You can't always get what you want, but if you really need something, you usually find it." "What part of the Bible is that from?" Ig asked her. "The Gospel of Keith Richards?

God saves - but not now, and not here. His salvation is on layaway. Like all grifters, He asks you to pay now and take it on faith that you will receive later. Whereas women offer a different sort of salvation, more immediate and fulfilling. They don't put off their love for a distant, ill-defined eternity but make a gift of it in the here and now, frequently to those who deserve it least. So it was in my case. So it is for many. The devil and woman have been allies against God from the beginning...

Him and God are supposed to be at war with each other. But if God hates sin and Satan punishes the sinners, aren’t they working the same side of the street? Aren’t the judge and the executioner on the same team?

I will be waiting by candlelight in our tree house of the mind.

Some things you didn't give away, no matter how much you owed.

The language of sin was universal, the original Esperanto.

It was like wondering how evil had come into the world or what happens to a person after he dies: an interesting philosophical exercise, but also curiously pointless, since evil and death happened, regardless of the why and the how and what-it-meant.

She liked things that had been written by people who had lived short, ugly, and tragic lives. Or, who at least, were English.

Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be kicked in the nuts as soon as they try to get back up. That wasn’t in the Bible, but maybe it should’ve been.

Terry was cool, cooler then Ig would ever be, but he was afraid. His fear narrowed his vision so that he couldn't see anything except what he stood to lose.

It was something... the way a person's life picked up speed, the way a life was like a bullet aimed at one final target, impossible to slow or turn aside, and like the bullet, you were ignorant of what you were going to hit, would never know anything except the rush and the impact.

It goes against the American storytelling grain to have someone in a situation he can’t get out of, but I think this is very usual in life

I liked AC/DC," Lee said. "If you were going to shoot someone, you'd really want to do it while you were listening to them." "What about the Beatles? Did you feel like shooting anyone listening to them?" Lee considered seriously for a moment, then said, "Myself." At the same time he was laughing, Ig was distressed. Not liking the Beatles was almost as bad as not knowing about them at all.

With its towering smokestack, it looked like a factory built to produce nightmares in mass quantities.

It was perhaps, the devil's oldest precept, that sin could always be trusted to reveal what was most human in a person as often for good as for ill.

People would believe almost any awful thing their private devil told them.

If you were going to live in hell on earth, there was something to be said for being one of the devils.

…if God hates sin and Satan punishes the sinners, aren't they working the same side of the street?

God loves man, we are told, but love must be proved by facts, not reasons. If you were in a boat and did not save a drowning man, you would burn in Hell for certain; yet God, in His wisdom, feels no need to use His power to save anyone from a single moment of suffering, and in spite of his inaction He is celebrated and revered.

The Devil and woman have been allies against God from the beginning, ever since Satan first came to the first man in the form of a snake and whispered to Adam that true happiness was not to be found in prayer but in Eve's cunt.

He threw the Bible into the trumpet case as well. There had to be something in there, some useful tips for his situation, a homeopathic remedy that you could apply when you came down with a bad case of the devil.

Poor kids often dressed up. It was rich kids who dressed down, carefully assembling a blue-collar costume: eighty-dollar designer jeans that had been professionally faded and tattered and worn-out

So many have wept for Jesus on His cross. As if no one else has ever suffered as He suffered. As if millions have not shuffled to worse deaths, and died unremembered.

It did no good to tell himself that it was all in his head if it went on happening anyway. His belief was not required; his disbelief of was no consequence.

It didn't make any logical sense for her to be worried, although Ig knew that worry and logic rarely traveled together.

The people you love should be allowed to keep their worst to themselves.

Talking to her now was like flailing his hands at a storm of hornets. It did nothing, and it stung, and yet he couldn’t stop himself.

...sin, which was another word for 'live.

It went to show that no one knew, when they abandoned a thing, what misuses it would be put to later by others.

Then, for a while, it was quite still in the old foundry, where the man and the devil lay side by side--although which was which would perhaps have been a matter for theological debate.

Basically, it comes down do this: You can live life as a cripple or a coward. What happens now is up to you.

It was as if the room beyond the blast furnace was a tub and someone had turned the faucets on the cold and hot running snakes.

Terry is sure that Ig has never even kissed another girl, let alone fucked one, and he has wished for a while now that Iggy had more experience. Not because Terry didn't want his brother to be with Merrin, but because...well, because. Because love requires context. Because first relationships are by their very nature immature. So Merrin wanted them both to have a chance to grow up. So what?

IGNATIUS MARTIN PERRISH SPENT the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke the next morning with a headache, put his hands to his temples, and felt something unfamiliar, a pair of knobby pointed protuberances. He was so ill--wet-eyed and weak--he didn't think anything of it at first, was too hungover for thinking or worry. But when he was swaying above the toilet, he glanced at himself in the mirror over the sink and saw he had grown horns while he slept. He lurched in surprise, and for the second time in twelve hours he pissed on his feet.

Thirty years of overlapping graffiti covered the walls. The individual messages were mostly incoherent, but then perhaps the individual messages were of no importance. It seemed to Ig that all such messages were the same at heart: I Am; I Was; I Want to Be.

Nah. Hero, for sure. Think about it. In his first adventure, he took the form of a snake to free two prisoners being held naked in a Third World jungle prison by an all-powerful megalomaniac. At the same time, he broadened their diet and introduced them to their own sexuality. Sounds kind of like a cross between Animal Man and Dr. Phil to me.

I do not claim that God is dead. I tell you. He is alive and well but in no position to offer salvation, being damned Himself for His lacrimal indifference. He was lost the moment He demanded fealty and worship before He would offer His protection. The unmistakeable bargain of a gangster. Whereas the devil is anything but indifferent. The devil is always there to help those who are ready to sin, which is another word for ‘live’.

Lee’s face was a Spock-on-the-bridge-of-the-Enterprise blank.

Oh, man, I’m no good at lying. Mom always knows. She knows the second I open my mouth.” Terence looked relieved. “So who said open your mouth? You’re in pain. Just stand there and cry. Leave the bullshit to me. It’s what I’m good at.

Ig had not been inside for years, but it was much as he remembered it. The foundry lay open to the sky, brick arches and pillars rising away into the slanting reddish light. Thirty years of overlapping graffiti covered the walls. The individual messages were mostly incoherent, but then perhaps the individual messages were of no importance. It seemed to Ig that all such messages were the same at heart: I Am; I Was; I Want To Be.

[...] In a lot of ways, I guess Satan was the first superhero.” “Don’t you mean supervillain?” “Nah. Hero, for sure. Think about it. In his first adventure, he took the form of a snake to free two prisoners being held naked in a Third World jungle prison by an all-powerful megalomaniac. At the same time, he broadened their diet and introduced them to their own sexuality. Sounds kind of like a cross between Animal Man and Dr. Phil to me.

Una buena novela para ella tenía que ser un viaje emocional y filosófico y además enseñarle vocabulario nuevo.

The Devil knows that only those with the courage to risk their souls for love are entitled to have a soul, even if God does not.

She was half talking to herself or, maybe more accurately, talking with her own private devil, a demon that just also happened to have Ig Perrish's face.

It was as if the day's whole motion had merely described a great circle that was always, inevitably, going to lead him back to where he had started.

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.

On the other hand, it was a well-known fact that cell phones were tools of the devil. He selected

Something terrible is happening to me, Mom,” he said, his voice cracking. For the first time all morning, he felt close to tears. “Oh, baby,” she said again. “Why couldn’t you have gone somewhere else?” “Excuse me?” “I don’t want to hear about any more of your problems.

Lee would learn the truth about music: that it was the third rail of life. You grabbed it to shock yourself out of the dull drag of hours, to feel something, to burn with all the emotions you didn’t get to experience in the ordinary run of school and TV and loading the dishwasher after dinner.

Her face was framed by two wings of lank black hair that curled under her long, pointed chin, so she looked like the female version of the wizard who was always giving Harry Potter such a hard time in the movies. Professor Snail or something.

But Terry doesn't touch her, won't touch her, never touches her. In a decade of knowing her, he has kept her at a friendly distance, even in his imagination, has never once considered allowing her into his sexual fantasies. There would be no harm in such a thing, yet he senses he would be placing something at risk all the same. What he would be placing at risk, he cannot say. To Terry the word "soul" first refers to a kind of music.

Are you sure I can’t have a little sniff of Oxy?” the doctor asked. He brightened. “I’d share. We could get fucked up together.

You’re people, too. Do something nice for yourself.

You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know.

He was poured forth into a thunderous torrent of souls, ejected from the earth and any sense of order and into this other, older chaos.

There had to be something in there, some useful tips for his situation, a homeopathic remedy you could apply when you came down with a bad case of the devil.

God saves—but not now, and not here. His salvation is on layaway. Like all grifters, He asks you to pay now and take it on faith that you will receive later.

Die Todten reiten schnell. (For the dead travel fast.) —“LENORE,” GOTTFRIED BÜRGER

It’ll always bother you, wondering what you missed out on,” Merrin said now. “That’s how men are. I’m just being practical. I’m not waiting to get married to you so I can fight through your midlife affair with our babysitter. I’m not going to be the reason for your regrets.

Satan has long been known as the Adversary, but God fears women even more than He fears the devil–and is right to. She, with her power to bring life into the world, was truly made in the image of the Creator, not man, and in all ways has proved Herself a more deserving object of man’s worship than Christ, that unshaven fanatic who lusted for the end of the world. God saves–but not now, and here. His salvation is on layaway. Like all grifters, He asks you to pay now and take it on faith that you will receive later. Whereas women offer a different sort of salivation, more immediate and fulfilling. They don’t put off their love, for a distant, ill-defined eternity but make a gift of it in the here and now, frequently to those who deserve it least

That's what was on the video," Lee said, a little breathlessly. "Horns. Holy fucking shit. I thought it was a bad tape. But it wasn't something wrong with the tape. It was something wrong with you.

For a time he read his Neil Diamond bible by the firelight. He paused, twisting nervously at 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 matter, Satan and the Lord are in agreement.

He had no doubt that Merrin had called out to God here in this place while she was been 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.

That night Lee suffered overheated, sexually complicated dreams; he dreamed that Merrin was naked in his bed, and he sat on top of her arms and held her down while he forced a funnel into her mouth, a red plastic funnel, and then poured gasoline into it, and she began to buck under him as in orgasm.

The foundry lay open to the sky, brick arches and pillars rising away into the slanting reddish light. Thirty years of overlapping graffiti covered the walls. The individual messages were mostly incoherent, but then perhaps the individual messages were of no importance. It seemed that all such messages were the same at heart: I Am; I Was; I Want to Be.

Nor had he wanted to get right with God; he felt that God needed to get right with him.

What's He ever done for you?" Ig asked her. "Does he make it hurt less when people laugh at you behind your back? Or more- because for His sake you're all alone in the world?

Because there is no God. Your prayers are whispers to an empty room.

In a lot of ways, I guess Satan was the first superhero.

He had despised that Mary with her idiot smile, symbol of a story that meant nothing, servant of a God who no good to anyone.

Ig laughed at that. The things people said. The effortless way they lied, to others, to themselves.

Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be kicked in the nuts as soon as they try to get back up.

In stories told later, many boys would claim that the girls on Coffin Rock were decorated with chunks of raw turkey, soaked in poultry blood like the chick in fuckin' Carrie, but this was embellishment.

You and Merrin's mother-have you really been praying for me to die?" "More or less," Mould said. "To be honest, most of the time when she's calling to God, she's riding my dick." "Do you know why He hasn't struck me down?" Ig asked. "Do you know why God hasn't answered your prayers?" "Why?" "Because there is no God. Your prayers are whispers to an empty room." ..."Bullshit." "It's all a lie. There's never been anyone there.

Ig knew her, of course. It was the same woman who had served him and Merrin drinks on their last night together. Her face was framed by two wings of lank black hair that curled under her long, pointed chin, so she looked like the female version of the wizard who was always giving Harry Potter such a hard time in the movies. Professor Snail or something. Ig had been waiting to read the books with the children he and Merrin planned to have together.

With the cross around his neck he could be his old self again, he could have it all back if he wanted it, but it wasn't worth having. If you were going to live in hell on earth, there was something to be said for being one of the devils. - Horns p.381

Look at the girl I loved and who loved me and how she ended. She wore the cross of Jesus about her neck and was faithful to the church, which never did anything for her except take her money from the collection plate and call her a sinner to her face. She kept Jesus in her heart every day and prayed to Him every night, and you see the good it did her. Jesus on His cross. So many have wept for Jesus on His cross. As if no one else has ever suffered as He suffered. As if millions have not shuffled to worse deaths, and died unremembered.

I was too scared to kill you. I had a gun. I bought it just to shoot you. But the closest I ever came to killing anyone with it was myself. I put it in my mouth one night to see how it tasted.…I was scared to do that, too. Not because I'm afraid I'll go to hell for committing suicide. It's because I'm afraid I won't go to hell…that there isn't a hell to go to. No heaven either. Just nothing. Mostly I think there emus be nothing after we die. Sometimes that seems like it would be a relief. Other times it's the most awful thing I can imagine.

And where does this leave God? God loves man, we are told, but love must be proved by facts, not reasons. If you were in a boat and did not save a drowning man, you would burn in Hell for certain; yet God, in His wisdom, feels no need to use His power to save anyone from a single moment of suffering, and in spite of his inaction He is celebrated and revered. Show me the moral logic in it. You can't. There is none. Only the devil operates with any reason, promising to punish those who would make earth itself Hell for those who dare to love and feel.

Mostly, though, he looked at the girl, with her red hair and bare white arms. There was something about the whiteness of those arms that made them seem more naked than the bare arms of other women in church. A lot of red heads had freckles, but she looked as if she had been carved from a block of soap…She was very pretty, about his age, her hair braided into a silky rope the colour of black cherries. She was fingering a delicate gold cross around her throat, and she turned it just so, into the sunlight, and it shone, became a cruciform flame. She lingered on the gesture, making it a kind of confession, then turned the cross away.

At times, my brother made me think of one of those tapered, horned conch shells, with a glossy pink interior curving away and out of sight into some tightly wound inner mystery. You could hold your ear to such a shell and imagine you heard the depths of a vast roaring ocean—but it was really just a trick of acoustics.

Ig had always liked to listen to his father, to watch him while he played. It was almost wrong to say his father played. It often seemed the other way around: that the horn was playing him. The way his cheeks swole out, then caved in as if he were being inhaled into it, the way the golden keys seemed to grab his fingers like little magnets snatching at iron filings, causing them to leap and dance in unexpected, startling fits. The way he shut his eyes and bent his head and twisted back and forth at the hips, as if his torso were in auger, screwing its way deeper and deeper into the centre of his being, pulling the music up from somewhere in the pit of his belly.

Satan has long been known as the Adversary, but God fears women even more than He fears the devil—and is right to. She, with her power to bring life into the world, was truly made in the image of the Creator, not man, and in all ways has proved Herself a more deserving object of man’s worship than Christ, that unshaven fanatic who lusted for the end of the world.

And where does this leave God? God loved man, we are told, but love must be proved by facts, not reasons. If you were in a boat and did not save a drowning man, you would burn in Hell for certain; yet God, in His wisdom, feels no need to use His power to save anyone from a single moment of suffering, and in spite of his inaction He is celebrated and revered. Show me the moral logic in it. You can't. There is none. Only the devil operates with any reason, promising to punish those who would make earth itself Hell for those who dare to love and feel.