Famous Quotes & Sayings

Shalom Auslander Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 46 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Shalom Auslander.

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Famous Quotes By Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 483583

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. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 487640

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. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 790586

I moved a pillow aside ... preferring the joyful company of the delusional to the miserable company of the sane. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 657164

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? — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 246643

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

Shalom Auslander Quotes 1221809

My point is that death is more tragic than life, than any life, because every life has hope of some kind. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 1262512

Expecting hell, we're ill prepared for heaven. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 1792832

There is hurt in this world. There is pain. Hoping there won't be only makes it worse. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 1442131

Written with passion, honesty, humor, and a stubborn, rebellious optimism, Dear Marcus is like nothing I've ever read. When a bullet in the back told Jerry McGill not to go on, Jerry went on-smiling. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 616986

Roads are no place for naive chickens dreaming of nirvana. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 1366215

Write something dangerous. Say something you shouldn't. Blow something up. But well. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 138161

Maybe when I'd dead, he thought. Maybe when I'm dead I'll get some goddamned sleep. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 487599

His hope was that she would finish her damn book quietly and just leave; that one morning he would awaken and go up to the attic, and Anne Frank would be gone, and he could go on with his life, Anne-free. One hundred percent Frankless. Now with Less Genocide. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 2236559

Kugel set off, the wind in what would have been, some years ago, his hair. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 1851769

Kugel didn't like attics, he never did. The roofing nails overhead like fangs, waiting to sink into his skull; the cardboard boxes and plastic crates and leather trunks - tombs, sarcophagi - full of ghosts and regret and longing and loss; worse yet was the implication in all this emotional hoarding that the past was preferable to the present, that what came before bests whatever comes next, so clutch it to your chests in mourning and dread as you head into the unknowable but probably lousy future. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 1567335

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. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 1910834

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. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 1977714

SOLOMON KUGEL
His performance, of late,
had been subpar.
Born, unfortunately. Died eventually. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 2007854

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?! — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 2067483

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. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 2184609

Which is what it all comes down to, I suppose - how you're selling. Welcome to the twenty-first century, where the only opinion of you that matters is the one that isn't your own. Rate My Tits. Rate My Ass. Rate My Children. Rate My Essential Being. 1 Star: Awful. This Being left me feeling like I wanted more. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 2192110

My rabbis taught me that it was wrong to say God caused the Holocaust; that he simply, in 1938, turned His head. He looked away. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 1093170

Let him be floored, O Lord, thought Kugel.
Let him be stunned.
Let him be flabber-fucking-gasted. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 1048258

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

Shalom Auslander Quotes 1014876

We lie and we are lied to, and the best liars - the ones who don't even see it as lying - get the business cards and the corner offices and the fancy clothes some other liar tricked them into thinking they needed. At least it used to bother people that the liars and
frauds and phonies rose to the top, the citizens expressed concern that shit floated. Today we put the shit on magazine covers, laud its buoyancy, and anxiously wait to buy the shit's best-selling business book about how you can float your shit, too. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 91179

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. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 934600

He could pull this off. He was sure of it. It would have been one thing to protect Anne Frank from the Nazis; he was pretty sure he couldn't have managed that. But protecting his family from Anne Frank? How difficult could that be? — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 504113

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. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 138417

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. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 164945

Sages tell us that the Torah tells us that until the age of thirteen, all of boy's sins are ascribed to his father. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 192640

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. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 221004

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

Shalom Auslander Quotes 242158

Suck is life,[ ... ]:you get to a point, one day, where you are hoping to find crap; where the best possible outcome of all possible outcomes would be the discovery, praise Jesus, of a pile of shit — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 287781

I believe in a personal God; everything I do, He takes personally. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 302211

Hiding from genocide inside a Jew's attic, thought Kugel, is like hiding from a lion inside a gazelle. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 383427

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. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 427155

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. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 906580

Kugel wondered if in these days of the Internet you would even need a Miep Gies anymore, if you could make it through a genocide these days with just a smartphone and a credit card, and he was hopeful that in the event of another Holocaust, he would have some sort of broadband Internet access. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 521643

... It was the knowing that there had been a happier time, a place of joy and peace and security, that made the sudden absence of it all so agonizing ... Not the agony of what was, but the agony of what was no longer; this was the source of all life's pain
not the fear of a hell to come, but rather the knowledge of an Eden that is no more. Hell isn't the punishment ... Eden was. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 531537

Kugel had discovered of late that he was gluten intolerant ... It was difficult to avoid wheat, and gluten-free food was terribly expensive, but Kugel now thought it wonderfully appropriate that matzoh - the most hated food of his youth - was the one he, as an adult, would find he was allergic to, the one that his body was actually incapable of processing, the one that the lining of his gut identified as poison.
His stomach was anti-Semitic.
His bowels had assimilated.
His rectum was self-hating.
Anne Frank would be pleased.
His mother would be disappointed. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 575070

You can hope all you want for a happy ending, but sometimes, like it or not, the guy writing your story is working on a tragedy; you may not even be the main character. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 578616

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. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 688771

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. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 743004

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. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 749089

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. — Shalom Auslander

Shalom Auslander Quotes 904478

This, said Mother, as she handed him a piece of dry, tasteless matzoh, is the bread of our affliction. Where, young Kugel wondered, is the seven-layer cake of our salvation? Where is the muffin of our mirth? Where is our no-longer-reduced-to-jelly doughnut? — Shalom Auslander