Shalom Auslander

“Remember your grandfather's last words, Jonah would tell his children: Life is nothing more than a little why.”

“Just move the train, for fuck's sake, she's not getting any deader.”

“Every Jew was the last Jew; Tevye the Terminal, every single one. Yet, Kugel couldn't help but observe, in all that time - no last Jew. There had been a last Assyrian. There had been a last Ammonite. There had been a last Babylonian, a last Mesopotamian, a last of the Mohicans. But no last Jew.”

“His intelligence only exacerbated the guilt Kugel felt for bringing him into the world. It was one thing to have condemned a child to life, that was criminal enough, but life was a sentence more easily served by fools.”

“I kind of like it up here, Kugel said. It's got a certain fatalistic charm, a certain je ne sais fucked.”

“SOLOMON KUGELHis performance, of late,had been subpar.Born, unfortunately. Died eventually.”

“You never see a lion crucifyng another lion. You never see a bear just randomly murdering salmon for anything besides food; bears don't form armies, invade rivers, tear the heads off male salmon, rape the female salmon, and enslave their salmon children.It is finished, to Kugel, sounded a hell of a lot like Fuck all of you motherfuckers.”

“Kugel was a firm believer that death was not always a bad thing - that life often reached such levels of crapitude that dying was preferable to living.”

“I spent the best years of my life atoning for something I didn't do, something my parents didn't do, something done just about before I was ever even born. I got no complaints with that, but I'm about all atoned out, and I ain't yet gotten round to atoning for the things I did do.”

“I'm down here, trying to live, trying to deal with the real world, while you're hiding, bitching, fucking everyone's shit up but your own, so shut up, just shut the fuck up. Thirty-two million copies, thirty-two million copies, that's what you got for your pain. What do I get for mine? What does anyone get for theirs? Nothing, not a fucking thing, they get another goddamned day of it and another goddamned day of it after that, so just shut up, will you? Will you just shut up?”

“Let him be floored, O Lord, thought Kugel.Let him be stunned.Let him be flabber-fucking-gasted.”

“Kugel set off, the wind in what would have been, some years ago, his hair.”

“Kugel awoke early the next morning, turning his face from the harsh rays of intruding sunlight that stretched across the room like some goddamned thing that stretches across some other goddamned thing.Why did children always draw the sun smiling? he wondered. It's a giant ball of fire, kids. It's rage and fury. Whatever it's doing, it isn't fucking smiling.”

“What a world, thought Kugel; whoever you were, wherever you were, whatever time of the day or night, you could open your back door and call out I know you're out there motherfucker, and nine times out of ten you'd be right.”

“Maybe when I'd dead, he thought. Maybe when I'm dead I'll get some goddamned sleep.”

“He took the diary from Mother's hand and turned it over. The heartbreaking something, he read, of a tragic whatever.”

“The Kugels, Kugel hated to admit, might just have to, in the event of genocide, rely on the kindness of strangers.Mother used to say: I can name six million people who relied on the kindness of strangers.”

“Hiding from genocide inside a Jew's attic, thought Kugel, is like hiding from a lion inside a gazelle.”

“What’s the harm in forgetting? What does remembering do? Kugel had read that the war in the Balkans was referred to as the War of the Grandmothers; that after 50 years of peace, it was the grandmothers who reminded their offspring to hate each other, the grandmothers who reminded them of past atrocities, of indignities long gone. Never forget! shouted the grandmothers. So their grandchildren remembered, and their grandchildren died.”

“We are rational creatures, Professor Jove explained; hope is irrational. We thus set ourselves up for one dispiriting fall after the next. Anger and depression are not diseases or dysfunctions or anomalies; they are perfectly rational responses to the myriad avoidable disappointments that begin in a thoroughly irrational hope.”

“So desperate was Kugel for things to turn out for the best, proclaimed Professor Jove, that he couldn't stop worrying about the worst. Hope, said Professor Jove, was Solomon Kugel's greatest failing.”

“Stop expecting more from us than we can possibly provide, and you'll stop being so disappointed.”

“It couldn't be an all-bad world, could it, not with birds who warble and call? Maybe that was the secret - to find the few things that made life just a fraction better, and to focus on those. Bird warbles. Peach fuzz. Puppies barking as if they're full grown dogs. Nothing great, certainly nothing to justify the rest of it, but enough to keep you going.”

“...the greatest source of misery in the world, the greatest cause of anguish and hatred and sadness and death, was neither disease nor race nor religion. It was hope.”

“Vans are the vehicles of murderers. Serial Killers. Rapists. Thieves. Nothing good ever happens in a van. Police should be allowed to arrest van drivers without cause. The van is the cause, asshole.”

“Roads are no place for naive chickens dreaming of nirvana.”

“Expecting hell, we're ill prepared for heaven.”

“He imagined the scene at the gates of heaven to be not unlike that at the finish line of a long and grueling marathon: everyone high-fiving, hugging, collapsing, elated that it’s over, yes, it’s finally over, pouring cups of water over one another’s heads and saying, Holy shit, dude, that was fucking brutal. I am never doing that again.”

“I moved a pillow aside... preferring the joyful company of the delusional to the miserable company of the sane.”

“Oh no he does not! He does NOT read James Freaking Patterson. Our salvation - our provider…we must be out of our minds. I happen to find Patterson thought provoking and suspenseful. You what? Did you just say you find James Patterson thought provoking and suspenseful? Jesus Christ open your eyes! Are you so desperate to believe that you're defending James Patterson?!”