Quotes from Joe Queenan

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

Unless paid, I never read books by or about businessmen or politicians, nor should anyone else.

A reading life... is an adventure without maps where you meet unexpected soulmates along the way.

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.

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.

Every life, even the best ones, ends in sadness. Books hold out hope that things may end otherwise.

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.

Children are not born with their hearts hardened in this fashion, not even Irish-Catholic children. They have to be taught by professionals.

Lending books to other people is merely a shrewd form of housecleaning.

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

But only the English would insist on two separate versions of Gainsborough's checkout line. Or even have the chutzpah to suggest it. Julius Caesar didn't say "Et tu, Brute?" and "Where's the Praetorian guard when you really need them?" John Wilkes Booth didn't shriek "Sic semper tyrannis" and "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how'd you like the play?

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.

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

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.

But such a fortuitous rescue from ethical bondage is rare indeed.

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.

While traveling in this highly idiosyncratic country, it became clear to me that the Scots did not like the English.