Joe Hill Quotes

Sometimes history takes things into its own hands.

Nothing ever happens till it happens.

Life is a series of collisions with the future.

Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.

Destiny is always dark.

Fate. You could never anticipate it.

What goes up must come down. But don't expect it to come down where you can find it.

You can look out of your life like a train & see what you're heading for, but you can't stop the train.

Destiny urges me to a goal of which I am ignorant. Until that goal is attained I am invulnerable, unassailable. When Destiny has accomplished her purpose in me, a fly may suffice to destroy me.

The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible.

I am hanging in the balance of a perfect finished plan, like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.

Truly there is a tide in the affairs of men; but there is no gulf-stream setting forever in one direction.

Fate isn't some middle-aged man with a squint who won't recognize you if you change your clothes.

Life was mostly made up of things you couldn’t control, full of surprises, and they weren’t always good. Life wasn’t what you made it. You were what life made you.

Sometimes you imagine that everything could have been different for you, that if only you had gone right one day when you chose to go left, you would be living a life you could never have anticipated. But at other times you think there was no other way forward--that you were always bound to end up exactly where you have.

Who is it needs such flawless shafts as fate? What archer of his arrows is so choice, or hits the white so surely?

Fate with impartial hand turns out the doom of high and low; her capacious urn is constantly shaking the names of all mankind.

Men may second fortune, but they cannot thwart her.

Men are able to assist fortune but not to thwart her. They can weave her designs, but they cannot destroy them.

I, too, was carrying around my own fate. All the things I couldn't know sat somewhere inside, embroidered into me-maybe not quite fixed to the point of inevitability but waiting, in any event, for a chance to unspool.

The absolute contingency of the encounter takes on the appearance of destiny. The declaration of love marks the transition from chance to destiny and that's why it is so perilous and so burdened with a kind of horrifying stage fright.

Where destiny blunders, human prudence will not avail.

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts.

No king nor nation one moment can retard the appointed hour.

You never know how things are going to turn out, however much you plan. But you already know that.