Joe Meno famous quotes

04-28-2025

A book is actually a place, a place where we, as adults, still have the chance to engage in active imagining, translating word to image, connecting these images to memories, dreams, and larger ideas. Television, film, even the stage play, have already been imagined for us, but the book, in whatever form we choose to interact with it, forces us to complete it.
-- Joe Meno

#Dream #Memories #Book
What I've learned is that there is nothing in this life that does not fail to disappoint us, even our own deaths.
-- Joe Meno

#Doe #Failing
Being decent is the only thing that matters in a terrible world like this.
-- Joe Meno

#World #Matter #Terrible
We have fun acting like this, acting like we are incredibly offended. Really, we are just bored to tears with everything.
-- Joe Meno

#Fun #Bored #Tears
In our town there is a secret spot where you can still see the stars at night, believe it or not. It is the only spot like that left, unclouded by the dwindling skyscrapers rising nearby. It is a good place to go to walk and talk in whispers. Following the little hill that rises from the park to a small clearing which overlooks the statue of the armless general on his bronze steed, most of us later remember this spot as the first place we knew we might be in love.
-- Joe Meno

#Stars #Believe #Night
The more I write, the more I've come to realize that books have a different place in our society than other media. Books are different from television or film because they ask you to finish the project. You have to be actively engaged to read a book. It's more like a blueprint. What it really is, is an opportunity... A book is a place where you're forced to use your imagination. I find it disappointing that you're not being asked to imagine more.
-- Joe Meno

#Book #Writing #Opportunity
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.
-- Joe Meno

#Confused #Real #Love Is
I don't like the fact that no one has any imagination anymore. It doesn't pay to be a dreamer because all they really want you to do is answer the phone. Nobody wants you to think about anything new or use your brain or make anything interesting because everything important has already been made. America is over; it's done being brilliant.Everything genius has already been built, like all the great works of art have already been produced.
-- Joe Meno

#Art #Thinking #Phones
Funny as hell, searingly honest, and urgently real, Sam Pink's Rontel puts to shame most modern fiction. His writing perfectly captures the bizarre parade that is Chicago, with all its gloriously odd and wonderful people. This book possesses both the nerve of Nelson Algren and the existential comedy of Albert Camus.
-- Joe Meno

#Real #Book #Writing
Above the dirt of an unmarked grave and beneath the shadow of the abandoned refinery, the children would play their own made up games: Wild West Accountants! in which they would calculate the loss of a shipment of gold stolen from an imaginary stagecoach, or Recently Divorced Scientists! in which they would build a super-collider out of garbage to try and win back their recently lost loves.
-- Joe Meno

#Love #Children #Loss
After school the very next day, El Rey's mobile home was gone. I laid in bed and wondered what happens to people when they go, if they become like shadows, if they fade away when they disappear from your life. The only thing I could see was the broken picket fence. The only sound I could hear was the cry of birds being killed in the night.
-- Joe Meno

#Home #School #Night
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.
-- Joe Meno

#Trying #Radio #Ends
Our worlds are so momentary. We are along all our lives and then go off that way as well.
-- Joe Meno

#Our World #World #Way
The world of evil is only as evil as we allow it to be.
-- Joe Meno

#Evil #World
Imagination is a place where all the important answers live.
-- Joe Meno

#Imagination #Important #Answers
Potluck Supper with Meeting to FollowÂ is a marvel, deftly examining the connections between art and everyday life. Andy Sturdevant's lively, unique inquiries into trust fund kids, co-opted flags, gubernatorial portraits, art in second-tier cities, and Upper Midwestern esoterica, brim with both wit and humor.
-- Joe Meno

#Art #Kids #Unique
The longer human beings exist, it seems, the less likely we are to choose to be brave.
-- Joe Meno

#Brave #Be Brave #Humans
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.
-- Joe Meno

#Reading #Ideas #Trying
When she cries, it is quiet, tearless, almost completely imperceptible: one more unheard prayer.
-- Joe Meno

#Prayer #Quiet #Cry
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.
-- Joe Meno

#Sleep #Simple #Worry
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.
-- Joe Meno

#Voice #Ears #Goes On
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.
-- Joe Meno

#Afterlife #Tragedy #Triumph
The city glitters past us with its sharp edges, reminding us of how tiny, how weak, how totally unimportant we are.
-- Joe Meno

#Past #Cities #Glitter
An act of evil is the death of wonder
-- Joe Meno

#Evil #Wonder #Acts Of Evil
It is the strain of walking around the world-down the street, riding city buses and elevators, moving from place to place to place-and not knowing who might want to destroy you, who might like to fill your heart with poison, who might rob you and stab you, who might stand above you in the dark with a tarantula.
-- Joe Meno

#Moving #Heart #Dark
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.
-- Joe Meno

#People #Feels
The most important things in your life are almost always impossible to predict.
-- Joe Meno

#Important #Impossible
Maybe it was better to just go on believing everything was OK, even when really bad things were just about to happen.
-- Joe Meno

#Believe #Goes On
The boy detective thinks, The only thing all men have in common with one another is their inherent capacity to make mistakes. He reasons, 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.
-- Joe Meno

#Mistake #Fall #Boys

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