Top 38 Joe Queenan Quotes
#1. Everyone looks like they've just stepped out of a Dante Gabriel Rossetti painting that he never got around to finishing because even he knew it was too over the top. It
Joe Queenan
#2. And watched Alan Rickman act up a storm in Private Lives. Someone once said that this highly mannered actor had made a career out of being brilliant in roles where no brilliance was required.
Joe Queenan
#3. At long last, I felt a sense of accomplishment and a sense of closure. In the secret places of my very small heart, I had long entertained dreams of coming back in my next life as a moron.
Joe Queenan
#4. Children are not born with their hearts hardened in this fashion, not even Irish-Catholic children. They have to be taught by professionals.
Joe Queenan
#5. While traveling in this highly idiosyncratic country, it became clear to me that the Scots did not like the English.
Joe Queenan
#6. Book lovers are engaged with writers in a private communion that occurs in some vaporous cenacle of the mind.
Joe Queenan
#7. I dread that awkward moment when a friend hands you the book that changed his or her life, and it is a book that you have despised since you were fourteen.
Joe Queenan
#8. I was raised as a Catholic and received the body and blood of Jesus Christ every Sunday at communion until I was thirty years of age, when I became a vegetarian.
Joe Queenan
#9. Because to the poor, books are not diversions. Book are siege weapons.
Joe Queenan
#10. I have never squandered an opportunity to read.
Joe Queenan
#11. It is never a good sign when the most exciting thing on television is a dancing Republican.
Joe Queenan
#12. Library events scare me, as they provide refuge for local historians, fabulists, tellers of tall tales, historical reenactors, and even dream weavers. Not to mention the single most feared creature on the planet: the self-published poet
Joe Queenan
#13. I do not accept reading tips from strangers, especially from indecisive men whose shirt collars are a dramatically different color from the main portion of the garment.
Joe Queenan
#14. Good books don't make you think, because the author has already done all of the thinking for you, but a terrible book can really give your brain a workout, because you spend so much time wondering what incredibly dumb thing the author will say next.
Joe Queenan
#15. KINDNESS IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN WISDOM; RECOGNITION OF THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM. I have never found this to be the case. I've gotten this far being wise without being kind, and my feeling is: If it ain't broke don't fix it.
Joe Queenan
#16. Most people read drivel. That is their prerogative. The case can be made that it is better to read drivel than to read nothing, on the theory that people will eventually tire of garbage and move on to something more meaty, like trash.
Joe Queenan
#17. In other words, the man at the ticket office had personally had intimate social and commercial progress with more nitwits, dowagers, traveling salesmen, conventioneers, old fogies, and outright jackasses than the entire population of the City of Brotherly Love. I
Joe Queenan
#18. Books are a way of saying: This room seems to have more than its fair share of bozos in it.
Joe Queenan
#19. If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it's probably because at some level you find 'reality' a bit of a disappointment.
Joe Queenan
#20. Great writers say things that are so beautiful, the very act of repeating them makes life itself more beautiful.
Joe Queenan
#21. Every life, even the best ones, ends in sadness. Books hold out hope that things may end otherwise.
Joe Queenan
#22. Books did not need to be beautiful back in the Fifties, because nothing else was beautiful back then. Books were simply there: you read them because they were diverting or illuminating or in some way useful but not because the books themselves were aesthetically appealing.
Joe Queenan
#23. I like to stack them up on the shelf and move them about and rearrange them according to new parameters-height, color, thickness, provenance, publisher, author's nationality, subject matter, likelihood that I will ever read them. Then I put them back the way they were.
Joe Queenan
#24. Purists maintain that if you go to a baseball game you will almost always see something you have never seen before. Unfortunately, it usually takes place in the stands.
Joe Queenan
#25. Lending books to other people is merely a shrewd form of housecleaning.
Joe Queenan
#26. He used books the same way he used alcohol: to pretend that he was not here, and if he was here, that he was happy for a change.
Joe Queenan
#27. The problem with the English Patient is that to enjoy it, you have to be either English or patient.
Joe Queenan
#28. It was once argued that 'Starring Sylvester Stallone' were the three scariest words in the English language but until I saw Adam Sandler I'd always thought the three scariest words in the English language were 'starring Dan Aykroyd.'
Joe Queenan
#29. Saddling another person with a book he did not ask for has always seemed to me like a huge psychological imposition, like forcing someone to eat a chicken biryani without so much as inquiring whether they like cilantro.
Joe Queenan
#30. Unless paid, I never read books by or about businessmen or politicians, nor should anyone else.
Joe Queenan
#31. They couldn't abide the fact that the country was almost certainly founded by the Celts, who were just a little bit too close to the Irish for comfort.
Joe Queenan
#32. From the moment I own a book, even before I open it to the first page, I feel that it has in some way changed my life. I treat my books the same way I treat my clothes or my shoes or my records: I use them.
Joe Queenan
#33. Reading is the way mankind delays the inevitable. Reading is the way we shake our fist at the sky. As long as we have these epic, improbable reading projects arrayed before us, we cannot breathe our last: Tell the Angel of Death to come back later; I haven't quite finished Villette.
Joe Queenan
#34. Books, ingeniously coupled with music and alcohol, enabled the Irish to transcend reality.
Joe Queenan
#35. But such a fortuitous rescue from ethical bondage is rare indeed.
Joe Queenan
#36. Good books to not invite unanimity. They invite discord, mayhem, knife fights, blood feuds.
Joe Queenan
#37. Here I am referring to the types of books that thirtyish women devour at private swim clubs, often to the dismay of their drowning children.
Joe Queenan
#38. People who prefer e-books ... think that books merely take up space. This is true, but so do your children and Prague and the Sistine Chapel.
Joe Queenan
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