Joe Meno Quotes

#1. Without death, there is hardly any threat strong enough to truly appreciate human life. He thinks: I am as good as dead
too afraid to live, only waiting, never taking a risk
I am as good as dead already.

Joe Meno

#2. The world of evil is only as evil as we allow it to be.

Joe Meno

#3. The longer human beings exist, it seems, the less likely we are to choose to be brave.

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#4. I was getting close to thirty and was trying on the idea of becoming more mature. I was reading more. I had gone out and bought a lot of shirts.

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#5. My first book is really comparable to what I do now, where it's pretty surreal and strange at moments, but that being my first book - I wrote that when I was 22; it came out when I was 24 - and it was just really overwritten. I just didn't trust myself as a writer to say something once.

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#6. Being decent is the only thing that matters in a terrible world like this.

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#7. Our worlds are so momentary. We are along all our lives and then go off that way as well.

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#8. [Sex] is really awkward. You know you have expectations and then it's this great moment of connection and it's a surprise. But that's what so exciting about it is that sense of surprise.

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#9. Jack: Well, I've never been to New York, but I hear it's for assholes.
Odile: It's not.
Jack: Well, that's what I heard. Cool people don't live there anymore, They all live here. In Chicago.

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#10. Slow as your own dubious grace.

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#11. I was a shy kid and I was afraid what i said sounded stupid, so I hardly ever saud anything. I was the third wheel. Fifth wheel? I was the fucking wheel you didn't really need, but I still hung around. I thought maybe my silence would one day impress somebody. As of yet, it hadn't done much for me.

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#12. How's life?"
"That's the stupidest question I've ever heard.

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#13. We have fun acting like this, acting like we are incredibly offended. Really, we are just bored to tears with everything.

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#14. What I've learned is that there is nothing in this life that does not fail to disappoint us, even our own deaths.

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#15. There's slowly been a kind of shift in how we think about childhood. It's like childhood almost extends to 20 or 22 even after the end of college. When I was growing up, there was this expectation that you were on your own now.

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#16. But why? Why did you do the evil things you did?' Billy asks suddenly.
'Ah, because I could not imagine consequences,' the Professor says. 'To do harm, to live through evil, is to align oneself with chaos. Now it is the same chaos which is slowly destroying me.

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#17. The only thing all men have in common with one another is their inherent capacity to make mistakes. But there is wonder in the attempt, knowing we are all destined to fall short, but forgoing reason and fear time and time again so deliberately.

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#18. Go to a goddamn priest if you wanna be lied to. I've seen too many of your kind slip back inside to fool myself. If you wanna think you're a new man, hell, that's fine. But don't think you're looking any different in anyone else's mind.

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#19. What makes my work my own is where I'm writing from. And I feel like I have a million stories to write about Chicago.

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#20. An act of evil is the death of wonder

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#21. It is what we see when we imagine what the afterlife must be like: our happiest triumphs, our most sincere moments, stolen from the seam of our lives, a respite just before the onset of imminent tragedy.

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#22. Where do you go when you die? Ha ha. Go on, go on and tell her, Billy."
Billy smiles. "You become a little voice in someone's ear telling them that things will be alright.

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#23. For years, Thisbe will later think of that one moment in the field as the only time she was ever sure about anything in her life.

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#24. The city glitters past us with its sharp edges, reminding us of how tiny, how weak, how totally unimportant we are.

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#25. I felt really lucky that 'Hairstyles Of The Damned' and 'The Boy Detective Fails' were both bestsellers, and I thought that donating the money from 'Demons' was a good way to respond to that. My favorite artists are the ones that are willing to experiment, even if it means a smaller audience.

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#26. Perhaps Effie Mumford was only trying to prove something she already knew: that, like all animals, she was at the whim of the general disorder and unimaginative meanness of the world surrounding her.

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#27. When she cries, it is quiet, tearless, almost completely imperceptible: one more unheard prayer.

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#28. The most important things in your life are almost always impossible to predict.

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#29. I was just going to stand here and watch it happen. I wasn't going to say a fucking thing. Why? Because what did it matter? What did any of it matter?

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#30. I have a number of friends that try to live off their writing, and there's way more pressure for a hit or to write a certain type of book. You can't do a limited-edition short-story book with drawings unless you don't want to eat anything but ramen.

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#31. I told you why. If I don't do it now, I never will. I'll just be some office drone ten years from
now, wishing I had done something interesting at least once in my life.

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#32. Maybe it was better to just go on believing everything was OK, even when
really bad things were just about to happen.

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#33. C. On that cloudless Saturday morning, Madeline wakes up and sees Jonathan lying beside her, then decides that she's probably going to end up loving him forever.

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#34. I've been thinking a
lot and it's not that anyone did anything wrong. We just didn't know what we wanted. We weren't the
people we were supposed to be yet,

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#35. The city is just too big and too full of people to be alone.

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#36. And it's exactly what's wrong with the radio. It's like ... anything that tries to appeal to everybody always ends up sounding so cheap.

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#37. People are just greedy animals, after all.

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#38. Whether you work with a small or corporate press, the important thing is to have realistic expectations in terms of sales, promotion, and the work you have to do as an author promoting your novel.

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#39. Do not be confused by what the natural world knows: We are all, in our own way, completely and totally alone. If love is real, it is complete and total failing of the intellect. It is utter self-destruction. It is pandemonium.

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#40. When you're reading, like, a character's thoughts, or when it's in first person, you're reading kind of their own story, so you have the opportunity to see what makes that character complex or complicated. And to me, that's what the whole point of fiction is.

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#41. When I was growing up in the '70s and '80s, by the time you were 16, you were kind of expected to be an adult. By the time we were 16 and able to drive, certainly by 17 or 18 and into college, you just had very little interaction with your parents.

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#42. As an author on a corporate press, you have a lot less control over the finished product. I figure if I spend a couple years writing something, I want to be able to decide what the cover looks like and how it's going to be presented.

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#43. It's pretty hard not to like her," he says. "Even when
you know you shouldn't.

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#44. I'm still trying to figure things out too. All I know is a couple of very unimportant things.

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#45. In my fiction, there's a lot that's borrowed from music. It's never like I'm taking a lyric, but more the mood of a particular song. 'The Boy Detective Fails' was like listening to 'Eleanor Rigby' by The Beatles, this very melancholy-but-poppy song.

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#46. And realizes how there are all these moments, moments like just this one, there are all these moments, and how everyone lives their lives in these short, all-too-short moments. There are all these moments and what's so interesting, what makes them beautiful, is the fact that none of them last.

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#47. Maybe. Because he's got to try. Because she is too interesting, too beautiful not to even do anything.

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#48. Maybe that's why people have friends at all. Not because they like them so much but because they don't make them feel so much worse.

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#49. Beneath all of her thoughts and worries, beneath the complication of conflicting identities and needs, maybe it's as simple as loving the way some other person looks when they're sleeping.

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#50. I would say I have a complicated relationship with institutionalized religion.

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#51. Imagination is a place where all the important answers live.

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#52. Sex scenes in books are always like first person, from this male perspective and just about how awesome he is. It feels like such a fantasy.

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#53. I tell my students that with a 200-page novel, you are going to write 100 pages that don't make the final cut. See it as an opportunity, although it took me a while to enjoy that 'lost in the woods' feeling.

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#54. Please let there be a heaven for everything that is too pitiful to believe.

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#55. As the liquid paper's fumes quell his brain activity, Jack finds himself staring at
her again and what he thinks is this: Wow.

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#56. I don't think I'm special. I want you to know that," Odile says sharply. "I don't think I'm better than everybody else.

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