Jacob M. Appel > Quotes

“Maybe life involves the pairing of unsuitable people, those who wait and those who keep others waiting, and the key to happiness is finding the one person with whom you share the same internal chronometer.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Biology of Luck

“Marriage is like a series of opposing reflections, inverse images getting ever smaller like nesting dolls, each one of your trying to squeeze yourself smaller to fit inside the hopes of the other, until one of you cracks or stops existing.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Biology of Luck

“This is how most stories end in the hospital. Not with crash carts and sirens and electric shocks to the chest, but with an empty room, a crisp white bed, silence.”
― Jacob M. Appel, Phoning Home

“The most dangerous ideas are not those that challenge the status quo. The most dangerous ideas are those so embedded in the status quo, so wrapped in a cloud of inevitability, that we forget they are ideas at all.”
― Jacob M. Appel, Phoning Home

“The only thing more difficult than persuading someone else to start having sex with you is persuading yourself to stop.”
― Jacob M. Appel

“Maybe that is the greatest of wonders: that we can be shaped so much by those we've known closely, and equally by those we've never known at all - and that we too can change the world long after we've left it.”
― Jacob M. Appel, Phoning Home

“Nothing spices up one's sex life like having a partner.”
― Jacob M. Appel, Scouting for the Reaper

“Nothing sells tombstones like a Girl Scout in uniform.”
― Jacob M. Appel, Scouting for the Reaper

“Battery Park resonates with lust as the sun approaches its zenith. A primal impulse takes hold of the young couples strolling the gravel walkways, the newlyweds who have paused to admire DeModica’s bronze bull, the truant teens laid out on the cool grass. Maybe because all flesh tantalizes in the early summer, in the right light, or because, at this time of year, there is more flesh exposed, midriffs, cleavage, inner thighs, the park is suddenly transformed into a dynamo of panting and groping. This desire is not the tender affection of evening, the wistful intimacy of the twilight’s last gleam. It is raw, concupiscent hunger.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Biology of Luck

“You can measure a man's sorrow, and the world's, in the number of stories that perish unheard.”
― Jacob M. Appel, Miracles and Conundrums of the Secondary Planets

“Harlem sleeps late.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Biology of Luck

“Life is nasty, brutish, and short. Death is easy.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Biology of Luck

“I have vicarious morning sickness. Other people's babies make me nauseous.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Magic Laundry

“Nixon’s offences had been so long in the past, so much part of a different era that he now seemed like some lovable but bigoted uncle you tolerated at Christmas and Thanksgiving.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up

“I insert the bevel and draw back the plunger. I know that the syringe contains more than sodium chloride-that even as the toxic contents fill my fathers veins, he is sharing with me his final gift: the horror and thrill of saving lives.”
― Jacob M. Appel, Einstein's Beach House

“Patriotism is being convinced your country is better because you were born in it.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up

“An American man endowed with sufficient wealth can purchase anything, but an American woman endowed with sufficient beauty does not need to.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Biology of Luck

“Choose old people for enemies. They die. You win.”
― Jacob M. Appel, Einstein's Beach House

“If you give a man a hammer, he thinks he can solve all problems by pounding. Well, God gave men penises....”
― Jacob M. Appel

“Know your load. That’s rule numero uno in this business, which is why I make them count the penguins out in front of me one at a time. I’m not going to be the schmuck who shows up in Orlando two
birds short of a dinner party....I know I’m pulling out of Houston with exactly forty-two Gentoo penguins, seventeen Jamaican land iguanas, four tuataras from New Zealand, and a pair of rare, civet-like mammals called linsangs. No more, no less.”
― Jacob M. Appel, Scouting for the Reaper

“One thing led to another. That was the only way to explain how Arnold Brinkman, who considered both professional sports and young children unjustifiable, had ended up at Yankee Stadium with a nine-year-old boy.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up

“Be optimistic. Always put on clean underwear if you're going on a date.”
― Jacob M. Appel

“To the bankrupt poet, to the jilted lover, to anyone who yearns to elude the doubt within and the din without, the tidal strait between Manhattan Island and her favorite suburb offers the specious illusion of easy death. Melville prepared for the plunge from the breakwater on the South Street promenade, Whitman at the railing of the outbound ferry, both men redeemed by some Darwinian impulse, maybe some epic vision, which enabled them to change leaden water into lyric wine. Hart Crane rejected the limpid estuary for the brackish swirl of the Caribbean Sea. In each generation, from Washington Irving’s to Truman Capote’s, countless young men of promise and talent have examined the rippling foam between the nation’s literary furnace and her literary playground, questioning whether the reams of manuscript in their Brooklyn lofts will earn them garlands in Manhattan’s salons and ballrooms, wavering between the workroom and the water. And the city had done everything in its power to assist these men, to ease their affliction and to steer them toward the most judicious of decisions. It has built them a bridge.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Biology of Luck

“I used to dream of true love; now I'm open to false, but convincing....”
― Jacob M. Appel

“A century ago, people laughed at the notion that we were descended from monkeys. Today, the individuals most offended by that claim are the monkeys.”
― Jacob M. Appel, Scouting for the Reaper

“Starshine’s greatest challenge is deciding whether a woman is too young to soothe or too old to shame. Handling the men is much easier. They may feign interest in figures and photos, but their underlying interest is for breasts and thighs. A generous smile often adds an extra zero to a check; an additional inch of exposed cleavage can clothe five Laotian children. The vast majority of these men do not expect to purchase Starshine’s favors. They are husbands, fathers, pillars of the community, the sort of upstanding middle-aged patriarchs who would rather castrate their libidos than compromise their reputations, and even if their three-digit donations could earn them a quickie with the canvasser, they would deny themselves the pleasure.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Biology of Luck

“I can handle being married for my money; it's being married for my life insurance that gives me pause....”
― Jacob M. Appel

“Never make enemies of anyone younger or healthier than you are. They write your history.”
― Jacob M. Appel, Einstein's Beach House

“Such is the demographic paradox of a junior physician's relationship with his patients: I worry about how to extend their lives. This anxiety inevitably shortens my own.”
― Jacob M. Appel, Phoning Home

“It amazes him that life never offers completely smooth sailing, even for one day, a sinister cloud manages to creep its way over the horizon. And, what makes life even more mysterious, what truly probes the depth and complexity of the psyche, is that on an overcast day that one cloud would pass entirely unnoticed.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Biology of Luck