Nathan Englander Quotes & Sayings

I'd much prefer my books to shoes ... In the summer I sometimes take walks without shoes but never without a novel. — Nathan Englander

He was surprised, as always, to witness a new degradation, to find another display of wretchedness original enough to bring tears to his eyes. He took a deep breath and ignored the sense of injustice, a rich man's emotion, a feeling Mendel had given up the liberty of experiencing horrors and horrors before. — Nathan Englander

Turn off your cell phone. Honestly, if you want to get work done, you've got to learn to unplug. No texting, no email, no Facebook, no Instagram. Whatever it is you're doing, it needs to stop while you write. A lot of the time (and this is fully goofy to admit), I'll write with earplugs in - even if it's dead silent at home. — Nathan Englander

No, no," Arnie says. "Fondle--fondle is to touch. Everything sounds Yiddish to you. Far-fetched, far-flung..." "Farflung is Yiddish." "No," Arnie says, "it's not. — Nathan Englander

And we know, until they stop their terrible motion, until they cease swooping and darting and banging into the walls, until they alight, come to rest, exhausted, spent, there is nothing at all we can do. — Nathan Englander

These are hopeful stories from hopeless times. Without them the grief of this nation would tip it into the sea. — Nathan Englander

How terribly unfair that his whole self aches because of the shape of a shoulder, the soft line of a hip. — Nathan Englander

It is hard to know what a person would and wouldn't do in any specific instance. And you, spoiled child, apply the rules of civilization to a boy who had only seen its opposite. Maybe the fault for those deaths lies in a system designed for the killing of Tendlers that failed to do its job. An error, a slip that allowed a Tendler, no longer fit, back loose in the world. — Nathan Englander

The Jewish day begins in the calm of evening, when it won't shock the system with its arrival. — Nathan Englander

I also knew that the deep rumble rolling through us was only nerves, a sensitivity to imagined repercussion, as if a sound were built into revenge. — Nathan Englander

When my mother told my father what had happened, he didn't want to believe it. "Nobody ever wants to believe what happens to the Jews," she said, "not even us. — Nathan Englander

Harder than waking from a nightmare was trying to wake herself into one. — Nathan Englander

You cannot learn to curse like an American. — Nathan Englander

What interests me when I'm writing is being able to crawl into a character's head and speak from his or her mouth. It's not pulling the strings on a marionette, it's not playing ventriloquist, and it's not mimicry. It's about inhabiting a character, and, at the same time, being totally unaware of what you've become. — Nathan Englander