Joe Queenan > Quotes

“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, One for the Books

“Electronic books are ideal for people who value the information contained in them, or who have vision problems, or who like to read on the subway, or who do not want other people to see how they are amusing themselves, or who have storage and clutter issues, but they are useless for people who are engaged in an intense, lifelong love affair with books. Books that we can touch; books that we can smell; books that we can depend on.”
― Joe Queenan, One for the Books

“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, One for the Books

“A friend once told me that the real message Bram Stoker sought to convey in 'Dracula' is that a human being needs to live hundreds and hundreds of years to get all his reading done; that Count Dracula, basically nothing more than a misunderstood bookworm, was draining blood from the necks of 10,000 hapless virgins not because he was the apotheosis of pure evil but because it was the only way he could live long enough to polish off his extensive reading list. But I have no way of knowing if this is true, as I have not yet found time to read 'Dracula.”
― Joe Queenan

“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

“Because to the poor, books are not diversions. Book are siege weapons.”
― Joe Queenan, One for the Books

“I have never squandered an opportunity to read.”
― Joe Queenan

“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, One for the Books

“Great writers say things that are so beautiful, the very act of repeating them makes life itself more beautiful.”
― Joe Queenan, One for the Books

“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

“The problem with the English Patient is that to enjoy it, you have to be either English or patient.”
― Joe Queenan

“Good books to not invite unanimity. They invite discord, mayhem, knife fights, blood feuds.”
― Joe Queenan

“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, One for the Books

“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, One for the Books

“My books have been part of my life forever. They have been good soldiers, boon companions. Every book has survived numerous purges over the years; each book has repeatedly been called onto the carpet and asked to explain itself. I own no book that has not fought the good fight, taken on all comers, and earned the right to remain. If a book is there, it is there for a reason.”
― Joe Queenan

“...books, ingeniously coupled with music and alcohol, enabled the Irish to transcend reality.”
― Joe Queenan

“A friend tells a story about taking his ten-year-old son to a Jets game. The game was being played during a driving rain on a freezing cold day, and the Jets lost by twenty points to a team they were supposed to beat. As they headed toward the exits, the boy looked up, with tears in his eyes, and asked, 'Dad, why are we Jets fans?”
― Joe Queenan, True Believers: The Tragic Inner Life of Sports Fans

“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, One for the Books

“Books are a way of saying: This room seems to have more than its fair share of bozos in it.”
― Joe Queenan, One for the Books

“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, One for the Books

“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, Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country

“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, One for the Books

“Book lovers are engaged with writers in a private communion that occurs in some vaporous cenacle of the mind.”
― Joe Queenan

“A reading life... is an adventure without maps where you meet unexpected soulmates along the way.”
― Joe Queenan, One for the Books

“Lending books to other people is merely a shrewd form of housecleaning.”
― Joe Queenan, One for the Books

“Unless paid, I never read books by or about businessmen or politicians, nor should anyone else.”
― Joe Queenan, One for the Books

“Still, it was impossible to deny: Going all the way to London without taking time out to attend a few horrendous plays was like making a special trip to Hell without ever asking to meet Satan. So this time around, I decided to plunge in headfirst. Never a fan of Noel Coward, I nonetheless reported to the Albery Theatre, forked over a king’s ransom for a good seat, and watched Alan Rickman act up a storm in Private Lives.”
― Joe Queenan, Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country

“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, Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country

“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, One for the Books

“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, Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country