Joe Queenan quotes
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“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 QueenanSource : "One For The Books". Book by Joe Queenan, 2012.
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“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 QueenanSource : "My 6,128 Favorite Books" by Joe Queenan, www.wsj.com. October 22, 2012.
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“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 -
“Book lovers are engaged with writers in a private communion that occurs in some vaporous cenacle of the mind.”
-- Joe Queenan -
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“The world is changing, but I am not changing with it. There is no e-reader or Kindle in my future. My philosophy is simple: Certain things are perfect the way they are. The sky, the Pacific Ocean, procreation and the Goldberg Variations all fit this bill, and so do books. Books are sublimely visceral, emotionally evocative objects that constitute a perfect delivery systemBooks that we can touch; books that we can smell; books that we can depend on. Books that make us believe, for however short a time, that we shall all live happily ever after.”
-- Joe Queenan -
“People who need to possess the physical copy of a book, and not merely an electronic version, are in some sense mysteics. We believe that the objects themselves are sacred, not just the stories they tell. We believe that books possess the power to transubstantiate, to turn darkness into light, to make being out of nothingness.”
-- Joe Queenan -
“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 QueenanSource : Joe Queenan (2004). “True Believers: The Tragic Inner Life of Sports Fans”, p.90, Macmillan
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“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 -
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“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 -
“Lending books to other people is merely a shrewd form of housecleaning.”
-- Joe Queenan -
“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 -
“Great writers say things that are so beautiful, the very act of repeating them makes life itself more beautiful.”
-- Joe Queenan -
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“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“I have never squandered an opportunity to read.”
-- Joe QueenanSource : Joe Queenan (2012). “One for the Books”, p.7, Penguin
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“Because to the poor, books are not diversions. Book are siege weapons.”
-- Joe Queenan -
“It is never a good sign when the most exciting thing on television is a dancing Republican.”
-- Joe Queenan
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