Howard Jacobson > Quotes

“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 Finkler Question

“So many unhappy women out there. Such a sea of female misery.”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“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, The Finkler Question

“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, The Finkler Question

“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, The Finkler Question

“It's never over till it's over with a friend.”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“Was he a bad man or just a foolish one? He didn't feel bad to himself. As a husband he believed himself to be essentially good and loyal. It just wasn't written in a man's nature to be monogamous, that was all. And he owed something to his nature even when his nature was at odds with his desire, which was to stay at home and cherish his wife. It was his nature – all nature, the rule of nature – that was the bastard, not him.”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“I could use the company but I can't go through the pain of getting it.”
― 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

“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, The Finkler Question

“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, The Finkler Question

“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, The Finkler Question

“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, The Finkler Question

“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, The Finkler Question

“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, The Finkler Question

“Aren't all dreads half desires?”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“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, Shylock Is My Name

“He would come to school balancing his night's dreams like an acrobat bearing a human pyramid on his shoulders.”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“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, J

“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

“Whoever spoke of a wise lover? The wiser the lover, the longer ago he stopped loving.”
― 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

“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, Shylock Is My Name

“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

“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, The Finkler Question

“History’s lesson is that bullies ultimately defeat themselves.”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“By what twisted sophistication of argument do you harry people with violence off your land and then think yourself entitled to make high-minded stipulations as to where they may go now you are rid of them and how they may provide for their future welfare? I am an Englishman who loves England, but do you suppose that it too is not a racist country? Do you know of any country whose recent history is not blackened by prejudice and hate against somebody? So what empowers racists in their own right to sniff out racism in others? Only from a world from which Jews believe they have nothing to fear will they consent to learn lessons in humanity. Until then, the Jewish state’s offer of safety to Jews the world over yes, Jews first – while it might not be equitable cannot sanely be constructed as racist. I can understand why a Palestinian might say it feels racist to him, though he too inherits a history of disdain for people of other persuasions to himself, but not you, madam, since you present yourself as a bleeding-heart, conscience-pricked representative of the very Gentile world from which Jews, through no fault of their own, have been fleeing for centuries...”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“You can't have a church town without belief and you can't have belief without intolerance.”
― 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, The Finkler Question

“That was what living a serious life meant, wasn't it, honoring the gravity of things by not pretending they were light?”
― Howard Jacobson