Quotes from Joshua Cohen

Tammy said, "It's all just a matter of being exhausted with whatever's your normal. Over there, the Palestinians launch rockets and become suicide bombers—over here we just OD.

David chopped and grimaced. "To be honest," he said, "I never understood anything with a dick in it.

Imagine taking home this beautiful young paleskinned blackhaired late-model Jewess. Into fitness, healthy living. Raised good in better Yonkers. Mother a Hebrew School teacher, which means for her a traditional education.

At least in America, you lose your house, you can get it back from the bank. In Israel, you lose it to the rockets.

Tammy said, "Or else it's like an addiction. Politics is, or how you feel about what you are is, or how you feel about identity and what it makes you do. Same appetite. It all depends on what you like: uppers or downers.

Or else the rallies are just for political bros to meet women. To try and fuck women. Divest, boycott. Enough with the torture, let's bone.

Mögen Fremde über uns alle urteilen!: "May we all be judged by strangers!

Forget the fictional characters – how many authors are being stopped on the street?

Now what I like about lit is that though you feel you know the characters involved, you don't – you get all the benefits of having a relationship, with none of the mess.

All who read us are read.

In the future we would have total storage, all of us would, our media libraries would dematerialize and just float above us, books would no longer sit on the shelves reminding us that we had not read them, music and TV and film formats would no longer clutter the den reminding us of all we had not yet listened to or watched. Also reducing domestic mess, the many devices on which we might ever decide to read or listen or watch would become integrated, merged, fewer.

Walter, it's a suitcase—you don't put a suitcase on a bed where you sleep. You know how dirty suitcases are?

The history of every people is also a history of its craziness, and the more science becomes a religion, the more religion must pretend to be a science, desperate for all logical explanations.

all these farm boys are asking her out. To go pick apples or something. How symbolic." "I'm sure the apples they're picking are apples. It's not symbol season.

Death is the only monopoly. Nothing can compete.

The online moguls have tried to persuade us that we're not losing a nation, we're gaining a world. Pynchon proposes that both are mere second lives, fakes. Only family is real.

MEMOIR The genre of an age that's lost all hope of a biographer.

A people's legitimacy is derived from its artifacts. Even a relationship isn't a relationship unless it's left behind its trash.

My famous friend Cal, not recognized in any café or caffè famous but recognized in one or two cafés or caffès and the reading room of the 42nd Street library famous—writerly anti-nonfamous. I've never liked Cal's writing, but I've always liked him—the both of them like family. He's been living in Iowa, teaching on fellowship. All of Iowa must be campuses and crops.

In the future we would have total storage, all of us would, our media libraries would dematerialise and just float above us, books would no longer sit on the shelves reminding us that we had not read them, music and TV and film formats would no longer clutter the den reminding us of all we had not yet listened to or watched.

Same church, different assumptions.

The history in my regular schooling was all about progress, a world that brightened with the Enlightenment and steadily improved; a world that would continue to improve illimitably, so long as every country kept trying to be more like America and America kept trying to be more like itself.

Why did the Church restore to Judaism the very converts it had just spent the better part of the Crusades trying to obtain, according to Dr. Netanyahu? Because the converts were bad Catholics? No, not all of them. Or because they were too good at being Catholic? No, not all of them either. Rather, the reason was because: as long as the Catholics still required a people to hate, the Jews had to remain a people doomed to suffer.

History treats time as a chain of happenings that we humans set into motion by our own free will; its first lesson is that a first cause does not exist because, as my teachers put it back in public-school, we learn history in order to learn how to change it.