Howard Jacobson Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 54 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Howard Jacobson.
Famous Quotes By Howard Jacobson
Before he met Finkler, Treslove had never met a Jew. Not knowingly at least. He supposed a Jew would be like the word Jew - small and dark and beetling. A secret person. But Finkler was almost orange in colour and spilled out of his clothes. — Howard Jacobson
Although I was too young to understand the theory of universal (that's to say male) guilt, I was old enough to know which sex suffered migraine and which sex caused it. — Howard Jacobson
At any age there is future one doesn't have. Never enough life when you are happy, that was the thing. Never so much bliss that you can't take a little more. — Howard Jacobson
Marriage is like a barbecue. When you light a barbecue, it's very exciting to see the flames. That's lovely, but you have to wait until the flames have died down. Everything that you want from a barbecue happens on the hot embers. You can't cook on those flames. — Howard Jacobson
If that made him heavy company sometimes, so be it. Who decreed that life was to be one long rowdy masquerade (punctuated with those little pets of melancholy indulged by a crowd who made a religion of their feelings)? — Howard Jacobson
Was it better then - measuring the loss - not to know happiness at all? Better to go through life waiting for what never came, because that way you had less to mourn? — Howard Jacobson
Thereafter he gave up on a career in the arts and filled a succession of unsuitable vacancies and equally unsuitable women, falling in love whenever he took up a new job, and falling out of love - or more correctly being fallen out of love with - every time he moved on. He drove a removal van, falling in love with the first woman whose house he emptied, delivered milk in an electric float, falling in love with the cashier who paid him every Friday night, worked as an assistant to an Italian carpenter who replaced sash windows in Victorian houses and replaced Julian Treslove in the affections of the cashier, managed a shoe department in a famous London store, falling in love with the woman who managed soft furnishings on the floor above. — Howard Jacobson
But aunties are equivocal figures of affection, wicked and unreliable, pretending love only so long as they are short of love themselves, and then off. — Howard Jacobson
A waitress, bringing Finkler more hot water, interrupted Treslove's answer. Finkler always asked for more hot water no matter how much hot water had already been brought. It was his way of asserting power, Treslove thought. No doubt Nietzsche, too, ordered more hot water than he needed. — Howard Jacobson
He let himself be storm-tossed, riding her billowing sea. When she held him like this he could see nothing, but the colour of his blindness was the colour of waves breaking — Howard Jacobson
History's lesson is that bullies ultimately defeat themselves. — Howard Jacobson
The perfect bacon sandwich is on white bread, very soft and very thick. Sourdough with a good crust. The bacon is half way to being crispy - and there's lots of it - and enough brown sauce to trickle down your arm. You've not really enjoyed a bacon sandwich unless 10 minutes later you're still licking your wrists. — Howard Jacobson
I could use the company but I can't go through the pain of getting it. — Howard Jacobson
How do you go on knowing that you will never again - not ever, ever - see the person you have loved? How do you survive a single hour, a single minute, a single second of that knowledge? How do you hold yourself together? — Howard Jacobson
The girls pick snouts from the pack as though they're chocolates and it matters which they select. — Howard Jacobson
You can't have a church town without belief and you can't have belief without intolerance. — Howard Jacobson
That's how vilification works. The victim ingests the views of his tormentor. If that's how I look, that's what I must be. — Howard Jacobson
You might as well wager on God because that way, even if He doesn't exist, you've nothing to lose. Whereas if you wager against God and He does exist ... — Howard Jacobson
At a certain age men began to shrink, and yet it was precisely at that age that their trousers became too short for them. — Howard Jacobson
That was what living a serious life meant, wasn't it, honoring the gravity of things by not pretending they were light? — Howard Jacobson
Could that be why Treslove so often found himself alone? Was he protecting himself against the companioned happiness he longed for because he dreaded how he would feel when it was taken from him? — Howard Jacobson
Whoever spoke of a wise lover? The wiser the lover, the longer ago he stopped loving. — Howard Jacobson
Art is made by those who consider themselves to have failed at whatever isn't art. And of course it is loved as consolation, or a call to arms, by those who feel the same. One of the reasons there seem to be fewer readers for literature today than there were yesterday is that the concept of failure has been outlawed. If we are all beautiful, all clever, all happy, all successes in our way, what do we want with the language of the dispossessed? But the nature of failure ensures that writers will go on writing no matter how many readers they have. You have to master the embarrassments and ignominies of life. — Howard Jacobson
So many unhappy women out there. Such a sea of female misery. — Howard Jacobson
I'm a Jewish Jane Austen. — Howard Jacobson
He would come to school balancing his night's dreams like an acrobat bearing a human pyramid on his shoulders. — Howard Jacobson
A life was owned by the person who lived it, he believed. What happened didn't always happen because you wanted it to, but what you made of it was your responsibility. — Howard Jacobson
But you don't always have to ask to know. — Howard Jacobson
But the shouts and smell of smoke had a powerful effect on me. I don't say they excited me, but they gave a sort of universality to what I was feeling. I am who I am because I am not them - well, I was not alone in feeling that. We were all who we were because we were not them. So why did that translate into hate? I don't know, but when everyone's feeling the same thing it can appear to be reasonableness. — Howard Jacobson
A novelist should make you realize nothing is stable. If you don't believe anything with robustness, you're doing something more radical than anything else. — Howard Jacobson
I took the route favoured by all worldly failures and became a spiritual success. — Howard Jacobson
All those words of praise they use for novels - spare, economical. Why should I shell out £17 for economical? — Howard Jacobson
An artist owed a duty to nothing except his own irresponsibility. It was OK for an artist to frolic in the water, no matter how bloody the waves or how high the tide rose. An ethicist had an obligation to drown. — Howard Jacobson
How do you explain to somebody who doesn't understand that you don't build a library to read. A library is a resource. Something you go to, for reference, as and when. But also something you simply look at, because it gives you succour, answers to some idea of who you are or, more to the point, who you would like to be, who you will be once you own every book you need to own. — Howard Jacobson
A phrase such as 'the idea derived from evolution that ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis' for example, not impossibly intricate in itself but somehow resistant to effort, as though it triggered something obdurate and even delinquent in his mind. Or the promise to look at an argument from three points of view, each of which had five salient features, the first of which had four distinguishable aspects. It was like discovering that a supposedly sane person with whom one had been enjoying a perfect normal conversation was in fact quite mad. Or, if not mad, sadistic. — Howard Jacobson
What it is to see, what liberties are taken when one looks, where looking leaves one vis-a-vis one's subject, or how far looking ultimately becomes one's subject - these are important questions. — Howard Jacobson
That was what was cruel about superficial change: it exposed what could never change. — Howard Jacobson
Don't I look after you when you're ill?' 'You do. You're marvellous to me when I'm ill. It's when I'm well that you're no use. — Howard Jacobson
To bar communication between intellectuals, who are always our best hope of peace, is particularly self-defeating and inane. It declares, inter alia, that we have a) made up our minds about what we think, b) closed our minds to what others think, and c) chosen to go on hearing nothing with which we happen to disagree. — Howard Jacobson
Why is dissatisfaction taken to be a mark of failing powers and patience, when it might just as easily be understood as a proper judgment on a foolish world? — Howard Jacobson
Because art, for all its adventuresomeness, is also capable of being the most recidivist of human activities, forever falling back in reaction to what was itself a reaction to something else. — Howard Jacobson
But he didn't have to listen to his father. Taking after your father was optional, wasn't it? — Howard Jacobson
T. S. Eliot told Auden tht the reason he played patience night after night was that it was the nearest thing to being dead. — Howard Jacobson
I suspect you're thinking of Pascal,' Finkler said, finally.'Only he said the opposite. He said you might as well wager on God because that way, even if He doesn't exist, you've nothing to lose. Whereas if you wager against God and He does exist ... '
'You're in the shit. — Howard Jacobson
In the matrimonial life of the Jewish male every day is Yom Kippur. — Howard Jacobson
But what is the imagination for if not tto grasp how the world feels to those who don't think what you think? — Howard Jacobson
But you tell me when there has ever been a reign of terror that wasn't instigated by intellectuals and presided over by someone possessed of the madness of the artist. — Howard Jacobson
And thinking of her waiting to be found, while he was waiting to find, gave a beautiful symmetry to the love he felt for her. — Howard Jacobson
There is no word for the sound a life makes. — Howard Jacobson
He no sooner saw the woman than he saw the aftermath of her - his marriage proposal and her acceptance, the home they would set up together, the drawn rich silk curtains leaking purple light, the bed sheets billowing like clouds, the wisp of aromatic smoke winding from the chimney - only for every wrack of it - its lattice of crimson roof tiles, its gables and dormer windows, his happiness, his future - to come crashing down on him in the moment of her walking past. — Howard Jacobson
Hephzibah normally left the dishes until the next day. Piled up in the sink so that it was near impossible to fill a kettle. And what the sink wouldn't take would stay on the kitchen table. Treslove liked that about her. She didn't believe they had to clean up after every excess. There wasn't a price to pay for pleasure. — Howard Jacobson