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Hope: A Tragedy QUOTES

Hope: A Tragedy QUOTES

1 " Kugel didn't like attics, he never did. The roofing nails overhead like fangs, waiting to sink into his skull; the cardboard boxes and plastic crates and leather trunks - tombs, sarcophagi - full of ghosts and regret and longing and loss; worse yet was the implication in all this emotional hoarding that the past was preferable to the present, that what came before bests whatever comes next, so clutch it to your chests in mourning and dread as you head into the unknowable but probably lousy future. "

― Shalom Auslander , Hope: A Tragedy

2 " It couldn't be an all-bad world, could it, not with birds who warble and call? Maybe that was the secret - to find the few things that made life just a fraction better, and to focus on those. Bird warbles. Peach fuzz. Puppies barking as if they're full grown dogs. Nothing great, certainly nothing to justify the rest of it, but enough to keep you going. "

― Shalom Auslander , Hope: A Tragedy

3 " … It was the knowing that there had been a happier time, a place of joy and peace and security, that made the sudden absence of it all so agonizing… Not the agony of what was, but the agony of what was no longer; this was the source of all life’s pain--not the fear of a hell to come, but rather the knowledge of an Eden that is no more. Hell isn't the punishment… Eden was. "

― Shalom Auslander , Hope: A Tragedy

4 " So desperate was Kugel for things to turn out for the best, proclaimed Professor Jove, that he couldn't stop worrying about the worst. Hope, said Professor Jove, was Solomon Kugel's greatest failing. "

― Shalom Auslander , Hope: A Tragedy

5 " We are rational creatures, Professor Jove explained; hope is irrational. We thus set ourselves up for one dispiriting fall after the next. Anger and depression are not diseases or dysfunctions or anomalies; they are perfectly rational responses to the myriad avoidable disappointments that begin in a thoroughly irrational hope. "

― Shalom Auslander , Hope: A Tragedy

6 " ...the greatest source of misery in the world, the greatest cause of anguish and hatred and sadness and death, was neither disease nor race nor religion. It was hope. "

― Shalom Auslander , Hope: A Tragedy

7 " What’s the harm in forgetting? What does remembering do? Kugel had read that the war in the Balkans was referred to as the War of the Grandmothers; that after 50 years of peace, it was the grandmothers who reminded their offspring to hate each other, the grandmothers who reminded them of past atrocities, of indignities long gone. Never forget! shouted the grandmothers. So their grandchildren remembered, and their grandchildren died. "

― Shalom Auslander , Hope: A Tragedy

8 " Roads are no place for naive chickens dreaming of nirvana. "

― Shalom Auslander , Hope: A Tragedy

9 " He imagined the scene at the gates of heaven to be not unlike that at the finish line of a long and grueling marathon: everyone high-fiving, hugging, collapsing, elated that it’s over, yes, it’s finally over, pouring cups of water over one another’s heads and saying, Holy shit, dude, that was fucking brutal. I am never doing that again. "

― Shalom Auslander , Hope: A Tragedy

10 " Kugel was a firm believer that death was not always a bad thing - that life often reached such levels of crapitude that dying was preferable to living. "

― Shalom Auslander , Hope: A Tragedy

11 " You never see a lion crucifyng another lion. You never see a bear just randomly murdering salmon for anything besides food; bears don't form armies, invade rivers, tear the heads off male salmon, rape the female salmon, and enslave their salmon children.
It is finished, to Kugel, sounded a hell of a lot like Fuck all of you motherfuckers. "

― Shalom Auslander , Hope: A Tragedy

12 " Hiding from genocide inside a Jew's attic, thought Kugel, is like hiding from a lion inside a gazelle. "

― Shalom Auslander , Hope: A Tragedy

13 " Vans are the vehicles of murderers. Serial Killers. Rapists. Thieves. Nothing good ever happens in a van. Police should be allowed to arrest van drivers without cause. The van is the cause, asshole. "

― Shalom Auslander , Hope: A Tragedy

14 " The Kugels, Kugel hated to admit, might just have to, in the event of genocide, rely on the kindness of strangers.
Mother used to say: I can name six million people who relied on the kindness of strangers. "

― Shalom Auslander , Hope: A Tragedy

15 " He took the diary from Mother's hand and turned it over. The heartbreaking something, he read, of a tragic whatever. "

― Shalom Auslander , Hope: A Tragedy

16 " Maybe when I'd dead, he thought. Maybe when I'm dead I'll get some goddamned sleep. "

― Shalom Auslander , Hope: A Tragedy

17 " His intelligence only exacerbated the guilt Kugel felt for bringing him into the world. It was one thing to have condemned a child to life, that was criminal enough, but life was a sentence more easily served by fools. "

― Shalom Auslander , Hope: A Tragedy

18 " What a world, thought Kugel; whoever you were, wherever you were, whatever time of the day or night, you could open your back door and call out I know you're out there motherfucker, and nine times out of ten you'd be right. "

― Shalom Auslander , Hope: A Tragedy

19 " I'm down here, trying to live, trying to deal with the real world, while you're hiding, bitching, fucking everyone's shit up but your own, so shut up, just shut the fuck up. Thirty-two million copies, thirty-two million copies, that's what you got for your pain. What do I get for mine? What does anyone get for theirs? Nothing, not a fucking thing, they get another goddamned day of it and another goddamned day of it after that, so just shut up, will you? Will you just shut up? "

― Shalom Auslander , Hope: A Tragedy

20 " I kind of like it up here, Kugel said. It's got a certain fatalistic charm, a certain je ne sais fucked. "

― Shalom Auslander , Hope: A Tragedy