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1 " But he didn't have to listen to his father. Taking after your father was optional, wasn't it? "
― Howard Jacobson , J
2 " 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. "
3 " 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. "
4 " The way an institution works is that you go along with the prevailing fiction. "
5 " But the shouts and smell of smoke had a powerful effect on me. I don't say they excited me, but they gave a sort of universality to what I was feeling. I am who I am because I am not them - well, I was not alone in feeling that. We were all who we were because we were not them. So why did that translate into hate? I don't know, but when everyone's feeling the same thing it can appear to be reasonableness. "
6 " That was what was cruel about superficial change: it exposed what could never change. "
7 " you can’t have belief without intolerance. "
8 " He didn’t want to feel better. He owed it to what he’d been told to feel worse. That was what living a serious life meant, wasn’t it, honoring the gravity of things by not pretending they were light? Rozenwyn Feigenblat had told him he was an ethicist, not an artist. He agreed with her. 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. "
9 " For himself, he wanted to impose his values on no one. He wasn't even sure he knew what his values were. "
10 " But you tell me when there has ever been a reign of terror that wasn’t instigated by intellectuals and presided over by someone possessed of the madness of the artist. "
