255 Quotes by Howard Jacobson

I took the route favoured by all worldly failures and became a spiritual success.

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)?

Do not hope for too much. But do not settle for too little.

The girls pick snouts from the pack as though they’re chocolates and it matters which they select.

But what is the imagination for if not tto grasp how the world feels to those who don’t think what you think?

Marriage is like a barbecue. When you light a barbecue, it’s very exciting to see the flames. That’s lovely, but you have to wait until the flames have died down. Everything that you want from a barbecue happens on the hot embers. You can’t cook on those flames.

In the matrimonial life of the Jewish male every day is Yom Kippur.

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?

T. S. Eliot told Auden tht the reason he played patience night after night was that it was the nearest thing to being dead.