Queenan Country Quotes

“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

“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

“While traveling in this highly idiosyncratic country, it became clear to me that the Scots did not like the English.”
― Joe Queenan, Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country

“Choochiness is yet another British term that has no precise meaning, but, like pornography, you know it when you see it. The way I have things stacked up, choochiness is a particularly British amalgam of cuddlywuddliness, cutesypiedness, and butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouthedness that embraces everything from shops named The Ketch to Hugh Grant’s stammer. It is a grating and often maddening behavioral pattern that makes others want to reach out and pinch the choochster’s cheeks while secretly longing to stuff a hand grenade right down his throat. “Paul McCartney is choochy; John Lennon is not,” says my brother-in-law, Max, who fled England for France in 1976, largely to escape from rampant choochiness. “Paul McCartney: choochy. John Lennon: not choochy. That’s the difference.” THERE”
― Joe Queenan, Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country

“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

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

“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.”
― Joe Queenan, Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country

“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?”
― Joe Queenan, Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country

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

“It is a remarkable irony that many of the best shows in London— Chicago, Oklahoma!—and even such harmless diversions as The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast—are imports from the colonies, while the homegrown productions include such luxurious twaddle as Mamma Mia!, Bombay Dreams, and Starlight Express. Brits who view’ American culture with disdain are the ones who must pay the freight here, being careful not to throw stones from inside their glass houses. Though it is doubtless a bitter pill to swallow, not everything that is idiotic, pandering, or unsophisticated originated in the land of the free and the home of Kenny G. Americans did not invent Cats.”
― Joe Queenan, Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country