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1 " 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
2 " 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. "
3 " You can't have a church town without belief and you can't have belief without intolerance. "
― Howard Jacobson
4 " 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
5 " 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? "
6 " But he didn't have to listen to his father. Taking after your father was optional, wasn't it? "
― Howard Jacobson , J
7 " 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. "
8 " A life was owned by the person who lived it, he believed. What happened didn't always happen because you wanted it to, but what you made of it was your responsibility. "
9 " 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. "
10 " So the mathematician and the artist are companioned in the same dark, and do obeisance to the same gods. "
11 " The way an institution works is that you go along with the prevailing fiction. "
12 " At a certain age men began to shrink, and yet it was precisely at that age that their trousers became too short for them. "
13 " So many unhappy women out there. Such a sea of female misery. "
14 " 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. "
15 " But what is the imagination for if not tto grasp how the world feels to those who don't think what you think? "
16 " It's never over till it's over with a friend. "
17 " I could use the company but I can't go through the pain of getting it. "
18 " 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. "
19 " T. S. Eliot told Auden tht the reason he played patience night after night was that it was the nearest thing to being dead. "
20 " 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. "
