21 Quotes by Shalom Auslander

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.

Yes, maybe I would write a book someday. I had always possessed a certain facility with words; when I was very young, my brother teased me so badly that one day I threw a knife at him. —No, said my mother.—Use your words.I did. I told him how selfish he was, how he was tearing our family apart with his stubborn belligerence, how he was becoming everything he hated in our father and worse. —Okay, said my mother,—don't use your words.

Sages tell us that the Torah tells us that until the age of thirteen, all of boy's sins are ascribed to his father.

… 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.

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.

Which is what it all comes down to, I suppose—how you’re selling. Welcome to the twenty-first century, where the only opinion of you that matters is the one that isn’t your own. Rate My Tits. Rate My Ass. Rate My Children. Rate My Essential Being. 1 Star: Awful. This Being left me feeling like I wanted more.

...his hope was that she would finish her damn book quietly and just leave; that one morning he would awaken and go up to the attic, and Anne Frank would be gone, and he could go on with his life, Anne-free. One hundred percent Frankless. Now with Less Genocide.

My rabbis taught me that it was wrong to say God caused the Holocaust; that he simply, in 1938, turned His head. He looked away.

Roads are no place for naive chickens dreaming of nirvana.