Joe Meno Quotes

I told you why. If I don't do it now, I never will. I'll just be some office drone ten years from
now, wishing I had done something interesting at least once in my life.

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.

I always feel super uncomfortable when it's like ah, there probably has to be a sex scene. I feel really bad and then always look around to see if anyone is watching me while I'm writing. I want to apologize to people who have to read those sex scenes, but I feel like it's part of the characters life, it's important.

I've been thinking a
lot and it's not that anyone did anything wrong. We just didn't know what we wanted. We weren't the
people we were supposed to be yet,

Jack: Well, I've never been to New York, but I hear it's for assholes.
Odile: It's not.
Jack: Well, that's what I heard. Cool people don't live there anymore, They all live here. In Chicago.

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.

Being decent is the only thing that matters in a terrible world like this.

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.

You scan the cheering bleachers for the strange boy's face: handsome, reserved, with the eye patch, a little dramatic, a little scary. You finally find him sitting there in the middle of the sixth row. He is wearing a dark green army jacket and is staring back at you. He looks sad and beautiful, like a watercolor in a hospital room.

It's pretty hard not to like her," he says. "Even when
you know you shouldn't.

It will happen soon. Someday you will find yourself surrounded by people with the exact same interests as you, and you will never feel out of place again," I say, already wary of the incredible lie I am telling.

For years, Thisbe will later think of that one moment in the field as the only time she was ever sure about anything in her life.

Attention, God the Judge, God the Father, who Art in Heaven, give me one miracle, please. If You exist as I know You do, even if no one else in the world believes in You, please give me a brain tumor. Please tear my limbs from their sockets and let the backseat and my older sister be totally covered with blood. Please make me dumb and blind and deaf, please make me a martyr, please, dear heavenly Father. Tear my heart right from my chest. Drive spikes into my eyes and let hot lava shoot out of my mouth. Make me silent and thoroughly dead, but please hurry. Before we get home, before we reach the next stoplight, let the only sound be no sound, the silence of my death burning in the empty sky. If You are a mighty and true God, if You are not just a dream I have made up, please, before another hour, another minute passes, let the wire in my bra poke through my heart. Dear Lord, please, please, give me this one miracle. I have begged You every day, every evening, so please, let Your will be done, let Your will be done. Give me a gruesome death as fast as You possibly can. Thank you, God. Amen.

As an author on a corporate press, you have a lot less control over the finished product. I figure if I spend a couple years writing something, I want to be able to decide what the cover looks like and how it's going to be presented.

Most novels put out by small or corporate presses don't really sell that well - usually a thousand copies or so. Working with a small press, you have to be willing to book reading tours, plan events, make contacts with other small press authors, and find new ways of getting word about your new work out there.

What I've learned is that there is nothing in this life that does not fail to disappoint us, even our own deaths.

Sex scenes in books are always like first person, from this male perspective and just about how awesome he is. It feels like such a fantasy.

I really do. It's the first time I don't have to think at work, you know. It's really simple. You
just answer the phone and put in people's orders. It's pretty laid back. You don't like it?"
"No. I feel like it's killing my brain."
"Maybe that's why I like it. I don't mind not having to think.

In our town - our town of shadows, our town of mystery - it seems our buildings have, without reason, begun to disappear completely. Still full of their loyal inhabitants, the buildings and the people all disintegrate soundlessly. The air has been hard to breathe, full of regret and the glassy voices of the unsurprised dead. Our commuters have begun carrying photographs of their loved ones with them to work. On the bus, we look at each other, pictures of our sad wives and doubtful children huddled close to our chests, quietly imagining the silent elaborations of our own deaths. We are disappointed coming home that evening because the many photos betray our cowardice: We live in a town that is disappearing, and worse, like the buildings, our hope is gone and we are no longer surprised by anything.

He wants to say: First of
all, you were wrong about pop music. And art and all of pop culture. And all kinds of things.
Because all of it matters. Even if it is awful. Everybody knows all the bad movies and the bad
songs on the radio. Because it's the only thing anybody has in common anymore. It's all anybody
has. So you were wrong about that and you were wrong about us and you were wrong about me,
but he doesn't actually say any of this out loud.

I was just going to stand here and watch it happen. I wasn't going to say a fucking thing. Why? Because what did it matter? What did any of it matter?

[Sex] is really awkward. You know you have expectations and then it's this great moment of connection and it's a surprise. But that's what so exciting about it is that sense of surprise.

C. On that cloudless Saturday morning, Madeline wakes up and sees Jonathan lying beside her, then decides that she's probably going to end up loving him forever.

Just because you have blue hair and fucked-up clothes doesn't mean you're better than everyone
else. Because you know what? You're just conforming to someone else's code. Even though you don't
wear khakis or sweaters or whatever, but to me all you guys look the same. You think you're so
individualistic, but you're not. You guys - you and Kim and all the rest - you're like anti-snob snobs.
But you're just as mean as the preppy kids. You're all just as fucking lame.

Whether you work with a small or corporate press, the important thing is to have realistic expectations in terms of sales, promotion, and the work you have to do as an author promoting your novel.

We have fun acting like this, acting like we are incredibly offended. Really, we are just bored to tears with everything.

I have a number of friends that try to live off their writing, and there's way more pressure for a hit or to write a certain type of book. You can't do a limited-edition short-story book with drawings unless you don't want to eat anything but ramen.

Perhaps Effie Mumford was only trying to prove something she already knew: that, like all animals, she was at the whim of the general disorder and unimaginative meanness of the world surrounding her.

I'm still trying to figure things out too. All I know is a couple of very unimportant things.

The last four days
where everything has finally made some sense. And why is she so ready to throw this away? Because.
Because eventually every relationship she's been in has turned to shit. Eventually she ends up
screwing everything up. So maybe it's better to leave now before people's feelings get hurt.

Sacrifice doesn't really exist on a national level anymore and that's a pretty new thing - most people aren't engaged nationally in some form of service and that changes the way you think about people in your country; you kind of think of them at a distance. And so there's that shift away from some sort of sacrifice - thinking of yourself as the most important thing in the world versus thinking of yourself as some sort of a whole.

Listen, I'm going to give you some advice, not because I
think you need it, but because I feel like I've earned it. The right, I mean. To give advice. Here it is:
don't hold onto things. It's a problem the men in my family have. It's taken me a long time to figure
this out. Me, my father, my grandfather, we collect things. We collect miseries. It's what we do. But
sometimes the best thing to do is to just let things go. To let them pass.

What makes my work my own is where I'm writing from. And I feel like I have a million stories to write about Chicago.

wondered about what he said and then thought hard. I could
never be a dick, not to Gretchen anyway, so I guess I was doomed; doomed to go for this girl that
didn't go for me. But that was OK as I long as I did everything I could.

An apple could make you laugh: You are so charming. On our lunch, we find our way along the crowded boulevard. You stop abruptly and pluck two green apples from someone selling them on the street. You look at them and decide they are in love, these two apples. You make them whisper to one another. You make them dance: The kinds of dances they do are dainty. spontaneous. At the end of the dancing, the apples get marries in a little ceremony. After the two apples kiss, you and I laugh. It'll be okay going for the two apples, they will get on fine, anyone can tell. Together, we walk back to the office and hate each other for how easily we can laugh about this.

People are just greedy animals, after all.

Our worlds are so momentary. We are along all our lives and then go off that way as well.

Maybe, he thinks, as he's riding on through the snow, maybe this is why she's leaving. Maybe
she fell in love with me when we were kids. And now: and now: and now: we're not kids anymore.

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.

Slow as your own dubious grace.

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.

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.

The more you like a girl, the less she likes you. It's like fucking scientific."
"What about you and Kim?"
"That's what I'm talking about, little dude. If I start being nice and acting cool and saying things
and being on time, she starts acting, you know, fucking uninterested. But if I act like a total dick, then
she calls me all the fucking time. It's fucking crazy, because I really like her and all, but when I say
nice shit to her, she gets all freaked out and says she needs some fucking space and all. So I just act
like I don't give a shit, you know? It's all part of God's plan," he said, nodding.

I tell my students that with a 200-page novel, you are going to write 100 pages that don't make the final cut. See it as an opportunity, although it took me a while to enjoy that 'lost in the woods' feeling.

It would always be a put-on, high school or not, for the whole rest of the world, for the rest of our lives. You couldn't ever guess who someone was by the way they looked because, good or bad, the way they looked was always just a costume or an act. It was Halloween everyday, for most people anyway, just to feel like they weren't alone, to belong, just to keep being happy maybe.

Maybe it was better to just go on believing everything was OK, even when
really bad things were just about to happen.

I felt really lucky that 'Hairstyles Of The Damned' and 'The Boy Detective Fails' were both bestsellers, and I thought that donating the money from 'Demons' was a good way to respond to that. My favorite artists are the ones that are willing to experiment, even if it means a smaller audience.

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.

My first book is really comparable to what I do now, where it's pretty surreal and strange at moments, but that being my first book - I wrote that when I was 22; it came out when I was 24 - and it was just really overwritten. I just didn't trust myself as a writer to say something once.

In my fiction, there's a lot that's borrowed from music. It's never like I'm taking a lyric, but more the mood of a particular song. 'The Boy Detective Fails' was like listening to 'Eleanor Rigby' by The Beatles, this very melancholy-but-poppy song.

And he says, "I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with me. And I think I realized that I'm
average, that there's nothing remarkable about me. And I wanted to know if this is something other
people think about.

Potluck Supper with Meeting to Follow 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.

There's slowly been a kind of shift in how we think about childhood. It's like childhood almost extends to 20 or 22 even after the end of college. When I was growing up, there was this expectation that you were on your own now.

Imagination is a place where all the important answers live.

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.

It is no parlor trick: There is a skull and, in the dark, it is glowing. Somehow it is now floating above us all. Listen: The skull is speaking. It is saying your name. It knows about you and your favorite flower and all about your tenth birthday. But it does not matter. You are not convinced. For some reason, you are still full of doubt. You stare into the dark, looking for wires. Grasping for strings, you hold your hands out.

When you're reading, like, a character's thoughts, or when it's in first person, you're reading kind of their own story, so you have the opportunity to see what makes that character complex or complicated. And to me, that's what the whole point of fiction is.

I was a shy kid and I was afraid what i said sounded stupid, so I hardly ever saud anything. I was the third wheel. Fifth wheel? I was the fucking wheel you didn't really need, but I still hung around. I thought maybe my silence would one day impress somebody. As of yet, it hadn't done much for me.

The world of evil is only as evil as we allow it to be.

Maybe. Because he's got to try. Because she is too interesting, too beautiful not to even do anything.

We did something very simple," Effie says.
"Yes, and what was that?"
Effie Mumford stares off the porch into the night sky. The first stars of the evening are quietly arriving, and Billy, following her gaze, listens as the small girl speaks.
"We allowed ourselves, for one brief moment, to believe in something we could not see.

I don't think I'm special. I want you to know that," Odile says sharply. "I don't think I'm better than everybody else.

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.

An act of evil is the death of wonder

A book is actually a place, a place where we, as adults, still have the chance to engage in active imagining, translating word into 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 ... The fact that books provide us the place to imagine is critically important, as it is there, in the imagination, that all sense of possibility rests.

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.

Go to a goddamn priest if you wanna be lied to. I've seen too many of your kind slip back inside to fool myself. If you wanna think you're a new man, hell, that's fine. But don't think you're looking any different in anyone else's mind.

Kristin nods, marching ahead of Clark, who gazes as the impossible smallness of Kristin's ankles and feet. Years later, while imprisoned for drug charges, he will think of those tiny feet and know he is forever doomed for having lied to her, for having harmed something so delicate, so defenseless, so small, so weak.