Jonathan Rosen > Quotes

“Starlets were always turning up dead in people's pools. They fished them out like goldfish. Nobody seemed to find it unusual that so many young, beautiful women wanted to die.”
― Jonathan Rosen, Eve's Apple

“Most people don't want to die, but they don't want to live either. I am speaking about men now as much as women. They look for a third way, but there is no third way.”
― Jonathan Rosen, Eve's Apple

“It means that the things that make us human often make us ill.”
― Jonathan Rosen, Eve's Apple

“Money had replaced community mental healthcare the way medication had replaced state hospitals. Medication did not go looking for those who resisted taking it, and money could not administer itself. Neither came with counseling or support. The SSI checks Michael received, and the Medicaid requirements he was eligible for, did not create a caring community or even an indifferent one. Nevertheless, checks and pills were what remained of a grand promise, the ingredients of a mental healthcare system that had never been baked but were handed out like flour and yeast in separate packets to starving people.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“In my tradition, God revealed Himself in words and lives in stories and, no, you cannot touch or even see Him. The Word, in Judaism, was never made flesh. The closest God came to embodiment was in the Temple in Jerusalem...But the Temple was destroyed. In Judaism, the flesh became words. Words were the traditional refuge of the Jewish people - Yochanan ben Zakkai led a yeshiva, my father became a professor. And little boys, in the Middle Ages, ate cakes with verses inscribed on them, an image I find deeply moving and, somehow, deeply depressing. This might help explain a certain melancholy quality books in general, for all their bright allure, have always had for me. As many times as I went down to my parents' library for comfort, I would find myself standing in front of the books and could almost feel them turning back into trees, failing me somehow.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey between Worlds

“It's the side-by-side culture of the Talmud I like so much. 'On the one hand' and 'on the other hand' is frustrating for people seeking absolute faith, but for me it gives religion an ambidextrous quality that suits my temperament.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey between Worlds

“The Talmud tells a story about a great Rabbi who is dying, he has become a goses, but he cannot die because outside all his students are praying for him to live and this is distracting to his soul. His maidservant climbs to the roof of the hut where the Rabbi is dying and hurls a clay vessel to the ground. The sound diverts the students, who stop praying. In that moment, the Rabbi dies and his soul goes to heaven. The servant, too, the Talmud says, is guaranteed her place in the world to come.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey between Worlds

“There is a moment in the tractate Menahot when the Rabbis imagine what takes place when Moses ascends Mount Sinai to receive the Torah. In this account (there are several) Moses ascends to heaven, where he finds God busily adding crownlike ornaments to the letters of the Torah. Moses asks God what He is doing and God explains that in the future there will be a man named Akiva, son of Joseph, who will base a huge mountain of Jewish law on these very orthographic ornaments. Intrigued, Moses asks God to show this man to him. Moses is told to 'go back eighteen rows,' and suddenly, as in a dream, Moses is in a classroom, class is in session and the teacher is none other than Rabbi Akiva. Moses has been told to go to the back of the study house because that is where the youngest and least educated students sit.

Akiva, the great first-century sage, is explaining Torah to his disciples, but Moses is completely unable to follow the lesson. It is far too complicated for him. He is filled with sadness when, suddenly, one of the disciples asks Akiva how he knows something is true and Akiva answers: 'It is derived from a law given to Moses on Mount Sinai.' Upon hearing this answer, Moses is satisfied - though he can't resist asking why, if such brilliant men as Akiva exist, Moses needs to be the one to deliver the Torah. At this point God loses patience and tells Moses, 'Silence, it's my will.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey between Worlds

“Hollywood culture is a universal culture now. Everyone wants to step out of life and into the flat perfections of a movie screen. My own wish to drown was not so different from the desire those girls had to leave their real lives behind, to recieve new names and wardrobes and perfectly scripted lines.”
― Jonathan Rosen, Eve's Apple

“There are no true animal models for the disease. You can give a rat cancer but you can’t give a rat a thought disorder.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“Balzac’s assertion, which my mother also quoted, that behind every great fortune was a great crime,”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“And yet I feel an uncanny kinship to Moses as the Rabbis imagine him in that story, as I suppose that the Rabbis intended I should. Theirs was a system that made a virtue of ambivalence and built uncertainty into bedrock assertions of faith. No wonder fundamentalists and fascists have hated it so. And why I feel drawn towards it even now and, in the face of everything, find myself oddly determined to carry my own flawed version away from the slope of Sinai where, according to tradition, my soul stood at the time of the original revelation.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey between Worlds

“The Talmud offered a virtual home for an uprooted culture, and grew out of the Jewish need to pack civilization into words and wander out into the world. The Talmud became essential for Jewish survival once the Temple - God's pre-Talmud home - was destroyed, and the Temple practices, those bodily rituals of blood and fire and physical atonement, could no longer be performed. When the Jewish people lost their home (the land of Israel) and God lost His (the Temple), then a new way of being was devised and Jews became the people of the book and not the people of the Temple or the land. They became the people of the book because they had no place else to live. That bodily loss is frequently overlooked, but for me it lies at the heart of the Talmud, for all its plenitude. The Internet, which we are continually told binds us together, nevertheless engenders in me a similar sense of diaspora, a feeling of being everywhere and nowhere. Where else but in the middle of Diaspora do you need a home page?”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey between Worlds

“It was easy to say that Michael had lost his mind, but his mind was the only instrument he had for locating what he’d lost. Knowing and not knowing were gray areas to begin with, shot through with ignorance and denial.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“Try to be one of the people,” said Henry James, “on whom nothing is lost.” As a writer I considered myself observant, but how much was lost on me! Birds may be everywhere, but they also—lucky for them—inhabit an alternate universe, invisible to most of us until we learn to look in a new way. And even after I had been shown them, aspects kept eluding me.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature

“The beauty of postmodernism was that it erased the world with one hand while rewriting it with the other, allowing you to inherit the authority you discredited like a spoil of war.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“Every generation is born innocent, and if that is bad for history, it is nevertheless necessary for”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey between Worlds

“Madness calls literature’s bluff by going beyond it and falling short of it at the same time.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“It was one thing to recognize the terrible toll they could take on the people inside them, and that, thanks in part to new medications, a majority of people with schizophrenia no longer needed to live there. It was something else to know what could replace the state system without destroying the idea of asylum that had given rise to it in the first place, or harming the people the system had been created to help. Hardest of all was to realize that the answers of a moment could not substitute for the slow, hard, complicated, and imperfect work of providing daily practical care for patients whose rights had finally been recognized but whose illness could itself seem like a violation of their reason and will.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“it was a “fact of social evolution,” as Nunn put it in 1920, that “spiritual leadership is the work of the few” to feel rightfully singled out.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“The first antipsychotic medication was patented in the United States the same year that LSD was sent to psychiatric institutes gratis by its Swiss manufacturer. Psychiatrists had a drug for squelching hallucinations in one hand, and a drug for inducing them in the other. It was only a matter of time before things got mixed up and the symptoms of mental illness blurred into the promise of mind expansion. One generation’s brainwashing was another generation’s mental hygiene. This, too, shaped our world.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“Michael had carried a knife, and slept with a baseball bat, because he thought his parents had been replaced by surgically altered Nazis who had murdered them and wanted to kill him.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“Madness calls literature’s bluff by going beyond it and falling short of it at the same time. When Bloom wrote that “schizophrenia is bad poetry, for the schizophrenic has lost the strength of perverse, wilful, misprision,” he meant that in order to read something “wrong,” there had to be a way to read it right. There had to be truth, whether or not you acknowledged it, instead of mere illusion.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“As Eddie saw it, there are very few things that really matter in life, and if you have a few, it’s a lot.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“These dramatic cases—Weston, Laudor, Ted Kaczynski or John Hinckley—are not the typical stories of schizophrenia. Mostly it is a story of quiet suffering.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“I thought the salt was arsenic,” Michael told me once. “I thought pepper was the ashes of our people.” “What do you do with a thought like that?” I asked him. “Suffer.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“As my father sometimes said, quoting a Hasidic story about a rich man who lives like a poor man out of sympathy, it was better for the rich to eat cake, because when they ate only bread, the poor ate stones.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“all the reasons people with serious mental illness were ignored: they don’t contribute to society, they don’t make money, they’re difficult, they’re disenfranchised—who’s going to pay attention to them? Until something tragic happens; then it’s a nightmare. This was the nightmare.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“The curse of Greek tragedy, “whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad,” was erased. Now, madness was the first step to recovery, even if it sounded more like philosopher-assisted suicide.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

“It was easier to be brilliant than smart, and easier to be smart than competent.”
― Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions