Quotes from Nathan Englander

Twitter is the best art for writers. I find it enticing.

I'd much prefer my books to shoes...In the summer I sometimes take walks without shoes but never without a novel.

How terribly unfair that his whole self aches because of the shape of a shoulder, the soft line of a hip.

Harder than waking from a nightmare was trying to wake herself into one.

43. My couch is 92 inches; it's a deep green three-cushion. It seats hundreds. But that's not why I got it. I got it because, lying down the long way, in the spooning-in-front-of-a-movie way, in the head-to-toe lying with a pair of lamps burning and a pair of people reading, it fits me and another – it fits her – really well.

The Jewish day begins in the calm of evening, when it won't shock the system with its arrival.

They went off to the Holy Land and went from Orthodox to ultra-Orthodox, which to me sounds like a repackaged detergent–ORTHODOX ULTRA®, now with more deep-healing power.

It is hard to know what a person would and wouldn't do in any specific instance. And you, spoiled child, apply the rules of civilization to a boy who had only seen its opposite. Maybe the fault for those deaths lies in a system designed for the killing of Tendlers that failed to do its job. An error, a slip that allowed a Tendler, no longer fit, back loose in the world.

When my mother told my father what had happened, he didn't want to believe it. "Nobody ever wants to believe what happens to the Jews," she said, "not even us.

No, no," Arnie says. "Fondle--fondle is to touch. Everything sounds Yiddish to you. Far-fetched, far-flung..." "Farflung is Yiddish." "No," Arnie says, "it's not.

You rented an apartment with its own escape route?" "I did," Z says. "It's not so paranoid when you use it to do just that.

?ovjekovo pravo bi?e pokazuje se u tri slu?aja. Kad je posrijedi novac, kad govori u srdžbi i kad je pijan.

Elke zomer worden de oude mensen kleiner terwijl de kinderen groter worden. Volgens Josh is er maar een bepaalde lengte beschikbaar op aarde en verwisselen de centimeters alleen van eigenaar.

Only remember, if you don't find what you need... in this life it's permissible to forgive oneself too.

There were new words for everything in their dead language put back to use. New words for the jets and their radar systems. New words for the tanks and the radios inside. But for this, for the hammer and beat of the forge, the Bible still sufficed.

And we know, until they stop their terrible motion, until they cease swooping and darting and banging into the walls, until they alight, come to rest, exhausted, spent, there is nothing at all we can do.

These are hopeful stories from hopeless times. Without them the grief of this nation would tip it into the sea.

He was surprised, as always, to witness a new degradation, to find another display of wretchedness original enough to bring tears to his eyes. He took a deep breath and ignored the sense of injustice, a rich man's emotion, a feeling Mendel had given up the liberty of experiencing horrors and horrors before.

And once the invasion begins? There's no knowing how and when, or even if, the bloodshed will ever end. Only that both sides will battle for justice, killing each other in the name of those freshly killed, honoring the men who died avenging those who, before them, died avenging.

Author reads for Seattle; it has always been his city. He reads for the buyer, who has always believed. Author reads one more time to his old man. He smiles at his reader, and reads on through the tears. Author reads on. And Author reads on.

There are secrets behind everything that God creates.

What I'm trying to say, whether you want to take it seriously or not, is that you can't build Judaism only on the foundation of one terrible crime. It is about this obsession with the Holocaust as a necessary sign of identity. As your only educational tool. Because for the children, there is no connection otherwise. Nothing Jewish that binds.

You wouldn't leave me?" he'd asked her honestly afraid. ...In answer, Miri had taken her time before sharing a kind of warning. "I can tell you I'd never leave you. I can also tell you that what makes any marriage work is the knowledge that no relationship should be taken for granted. That there is always a line where the one who'd never leave you is suddenly gone.

This time, as with every time, when the fighting starts it will be more terrible than the fight that came before. Always it is the worst, the most violent, the least restrained, a steady escalation. The singular rule.