Happiness Quote by Garrison Keillor

Keillor’s line lands like a friendly Midwestern chuckle that turns, on the last clause, into a quiet indictment. “A good newspaper is never nearly good enough” captures the essential dissatisfaction built into serious journalism: the facts keep moving, sources clam up, power hides the ball, and whatever gets printed is already a compromise between time, space, legal risk, and human fallibility. Good reporting is defined by what it can’t quite finish. The phrase “never nearly” is a double brake pedal, emphasizing that the ethical ambition of the craft (get it right, get it deep, get it fair) is structurally impossible to satisfy.

Then Keillor flips the mood: “a lousy newspaper is a joy forever.” It’s a joke, but not a gentle one. Bad papers don’t merely fail; they entertain. They produce clean villains, satisfying certainties, cheap outrage, and the narcotic pleasure of being told you’re already correct. Their errors have a longer shelf life than careful nuance because scandal and simplification circulate better than correction and complexity. “Joy forever” echoes the famous “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” borrowing poetic permanence to sneer at the durability of trash.

The subtext is about incentives: excellence is invisible labor, while mediocrity is an easy product with reliable demand. In Keillor’s cultural neighborhood (public radio sensibility, small-town satire, a lifelong reader’s melancholy), the line mourns a civic institution that can’t win. The good paper disappoints because it aims high; the lousy one delights because it asks nothing of us.