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.
Interpretation
Life moves forward uncontrollably towards a final moment, with uncertainty about the outcome.
In this quote, Joe Hill reflects on the nature of life as an unstoppable force, much like a bullet being fired. He emphasizes the inevitability of life’s trajectory towards a final destination, where we remain largely unaware of what lies ahead, experiencing only the exhilarating rush of living and the eventual impact of our journey.
In practice
This quote can inspire a graduation speech about the unpredictability of life's path.
She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.
The mad sometimes drilled holes in their own heads to let the demons out. To relieve the pressure of thoughts they could no longer bear. Jude understood the impulse. Each beat of his heart was a fresh and staggering blow felt in the nerves behind his eyes and in his temples. Punishing evidence of life.
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.
By...our readiness to allow arms to be purchased at will and fired at whim; by allowing our movie and television screens to teach our children that the hero is one who masters the art of shooting and the technique of killing...we have created an atmosphere in which violence and hatred have become popular pastimes.
A light here required a shadow there.
In any society, fanatics who hate don't hate only me - they hate you, too. They hate everybody.
It is the business of future to be dangerous.... The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.
All material in nature, the mountains and the streams and the air and we, are made of Light which has been spent, and this crumpled mass called material casts a shadow, and the shadow belongs to Light.
When I think of all the books I have read, and of the wise words I have heard spoken, and of the anxiety I have given to parents and grandparents, and of the hopes that I have had, all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.