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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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