Joshua Cohen > Quotes

“in seeking only to stay upright, you fall, are banished then cursed and reviled, condemned to wander a continent you don’t even know where you’re going, only when you’re expected, which is every Friday at sundown though your calendars were never coordinated and what you always thought had been west was really only a left turn taken with your back to the north, in haste and with little sleep, then upon your forehead, the development of a worrying mark.”
― Joshua Cohen, Witz

“All books have to be researched, but readable books have their research buried.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers

“my generation’s screwed—we’re not the immigrant experience, we’re not the assimilation experience—we’re the first nothing generation, we’ve got nothing to write about and no one to read it, everyone too busy getting technologized, too harried with degrees.”
― Joshua Cohen, Four New Messages

“I have what’s called an addiction to Ativan, and Xanax. Which is preferable to admitting to an aversion to planes.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“My necessities were books. I read a book at school, another to and from school, yet another at the beach, which was the closest escape from my father’s dying. Though when I walked alone it was far. Though I wasn’t allowed to walk alone when younger—so young that my concern wasn’t the danger to myself but to the books I’d bring, because they weren’t mine, they were everyone’s, entrusted to me in return for exemplary behavior, and if I lost even a single book, or let even its corner get nicked by a jitney, the city would come, the city itself, and lock me up in that grim brick jail that, in every feature, resembled the library.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“But death on the page is just a typo, I said: You can’t say for example, She is dead–“she” no longer is. You can’t say for example, She was dead–death itself, a condition coterminous with eternity, renders the past tense inaccurate.”
― Joshua Cohen, Four New Messages

“This is what I think of America -- nothing. This is what I think of American Jews -- nothing. Your democracy, your inclusivity, your exceptionalism -- nothing. Your chances for survival -- none at all. You, Ruben Blum, are out of history; you're over and finished; in only a generation or two the memory of who your people were will be dead, and America won't give your unrecognizable descendants anything real with which to replace the sense of peoplehood it took from them; the boredom of your wife--who's tearing her program up into little white paper pills she'd like to swallow like Percodan--isn't merely boredom with you or her work or with the insufficiency of options for educated women in this country; it's more like a sense of having not lived fully in a consequential time; and the craziness of your daughter isn't just the craziness of an adolescent abducted from the city to the country and put under too much pressure to achieve and succeed; it's more like a raging resentment that nothing she can find to do in her life holds any meaning for her and every challenge that's been thrust at her--from what college to choose to what career to have--is small, compared to the challenges that my boys, for example--whom she's been condemned to babysit--will one day have to deal with, such as how to make a new people in a new land forge a living history. Your life here is rich in possessions but poor in spirit, petty and forgettable, with your frigidaires and color TVs, in front of which you can munch your instant supper, laugh at a joke, and choke, realizing that you have traded your birthright away for a bowl of plastic lentils...”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus

“The chips were the enablers, limited pellets of silicon that served an apparently unlimited range of functions, as like a single snackfood delivering the tastes of chocolate, vanilla, pork rind, popcorn, pretzel, and chip in every bitesized bite.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“The best thing about search is you always find what you want. The worst thing about search is you never find what you do not want.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers

“If you’re reading this on a screen, fuck off. I’ll only talk if I’m gripped with both hands.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“Congress was just a gray repository that got its OS replaced with each election.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“Music laps at the shores of the intellect;
only those with no firm ground under their feet can live for music. — Karl Kraus”
― Joshua Cohen, Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto

“But the for serious offline impact of 09/11 was the continual contact, continuous contact, it encouraged. On 09/12 everyone went out and bought phones. The mobiles, the cells. Suddenly, to lose touch was to die, and the only prayer left for anyone who felt buried whether under information or debris was for a signal strong enough to let their last words outlive them on voicemail.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“and yet the fact remains that the youth today is more sensitive than ever. I admit I don’t know how to understand this phenomenon and have sought to approach it “economically,” asking the question of whether an increase in sensitivity has brought about a decrease in discrimination, or whether a decrease in discrimination has brought about an increase in sensitivity to when, where, and how it occurs.”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus

“The wife said, “That’s what it said in the pamphlet: follow in the footsteps of Jesus—but it didn’t say how many steps.”
― Joshua Cohen, Moving Kings

“NYers are cruel enough to neglect a bond due only to trackwork on the L.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“No one around me was doing anything, even making conversation. They were all just perfectly inert, laid out prone or supine as if submitting to autopsy or dissection. Only the dead or the lowest of species can bask, I’m convinced.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“A whiff of brine, a swank trestle adumbrant, Loading Only No Standing, 14th & 10th—this was Tetration’s NY HQ. I went through the doors and stood facing anything but the street, until a Tetbot treaded over to make inquiries. I stood behind a rubberplant. The Tetbot reversed and treaded after me. It was a clownwigged trashcan that barely reached my lowest hanging ball yet without compunction it was demanding my credentials: Tetrateer? or Tetguest?”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“Lift up the hem of verbiage, peek below its frillies – what’s exposed? the hairy truth?”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers

“By the highway, the Hudson—the library books straining at their delibags, corners poking. Straining my arms, throttling my hands, the numb rewards of literacy.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“Death is the only monopoly. Nothing can compete.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers

“Art that samples other art, quotes that quote other quotes--your writer knows this phenomenon, in jargon 'he's aware', he was raised in a culture of (not more ironic jargon, select only the most appropriate gustatory analogy): regurgitation, a culture of glutting to vomit and glutting again on the vomit until reemesis--chunky cheese mimesis--then licking that puddle again.”
― Joshua Cohen, Four New Messages

“May through to June I spent my time deciding how to spend my time, which is the first, second, and third through nine thousand seven hundred and griftyfifth items on the agenda of every writer, or neurotic. I was getting ahead of myself, fretting whether the book would have to have notes or sources cited, fretting whether I’d be allowed to decide anything at all.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“Let this meeting be as cryptic—as representative/nonrepresentative—as the Arameans, a people that never had a land of their own but still managed to leave behind their language—the only thing they left behind, their language. Aramaic. Ha lachma anya. This is the bread of affliction. Eli Eli lama shavaktani? Father, Father, why didn’t Christ quote the Psalms in Hebrew—was he that inept, or does excruciation always call for the vernacular?”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“se state leggendo questa storia su uno schermo, andate a fanculo. Parlerò solo se sfogliato come si deve.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers

“How am I, a writer, supposed to feel about having lost you to a reader?”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers

“Women, because what are they worth? Men, because what are they worth? Music, because what is it worth? and, more importantly with music, what exactly is the it?”
― Joshua Cohen, Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto

“As for yours truly, I’ve been sitting with my laptop atop a pillow on my lap to keep those wireless hotspot waveparticles from reaching my genitals and frying my sperm, searching up—with my employer’s technology—myself, and Rach.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“Judy was cruel. She had that smart cruelty to her of someone who’d gotten what she wanted. And she’d gotten it the fairest way, through suffering.”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

“A whole roasted lamb—stuffed with lamb sausages, organ and glandbreads, dried fruits and currants, tomato/garlic/onion mush, the entirety cardamomated, corianderized, cumined, cloved—was brought out on a spit, danced around. The carcassbearers were women, further gorgeous bursting Slavs,”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel