Quotes from Etgar Keret

No glue can make a person stick like that

More than one thousand uninterrupted puffs until she came along. With her "Excuse me?" so soft and gentle that even before I turned around I knew she would be ugly, because pretty girls don't have to try so hard to be gentle: people do whatever they want anyway.

She had this vague look in her eyes, half-disappointed, half what's-the-difference. Like someone who realized he bought skim milk by mistake and doesn't have the energy to take it back.

Por el quincuagésimo cumpleaños de mi padre me puse a pensar por un momento en la vida. En como nos dejamos mear en la sopa. Como les dejamos pasar absolutamente todo a los más grandísimos mierdas, porque nada "vale la pena ni el esfuerzo".

Until he turned twelve, Nimrod was a shitty person. The kind of whiner that, if he wasn't your best friend, you'd have kicked his ass a long time ago. And then one day, just before his bar mitzvah, they put insoles in his shoes, and suddenly the guy was a whole new human being.

Kids who get Bart Simpson dolls too easily grow up to be punks who steal from candy stores, because they're used to getting whatever they want the easy way.

Me, when it comes to religion, I have no God. When I'm cool, I don't need anyone, and when I'm feeling shitty and this big empty hole opens up inside me, I just know there's never been a god that could fill it and there never will be. So even if a hundred rabbis pray for my lost soul, it won't do them any good. I have no God, but my sister does, and I love her, so I try to show him some respect.

Ä°ki tür insan vard?r, duvar yan?nda uyuyanlar ve onlar? yataktan aÅŸa?? iten birinin yan?nda uyuyanlar.

Two days after I killed myself I found a job here at some pizza joint.

Dad said I had no respect for money and that if I didn't learn when I was little when was I going to learn? Kids who get Bart Simpson dolls at the drop of a hat turn into punks who steal from convenience stores, 'cos they wind up thinking they can have whatever they want, just like that. So instead of a Bart doll he bought me an ugly porcelain pig with a slot in its back, and now I'll grow up to be okay, now I won't turn into a punk.

So if you're really unhappy down there, and if all kinds of people are telling you that you're suffering from severe perceptual disorders, look for your own way of getting here, and when you find it, could you please bring some cards, 'cause we're getting pretty tired of the marbles. - from "Pipes

Some people fall out of the third floor of a building and end up with nothing more than a black-and-blue mark on their backside. While others take one wrong step on their way down the stairs and wind up with a cast.

No quiero que adoptemos. Bastante difícil debe ser ya tener en casa un hijo propio. No quiero el de otra persona. - ¿Y si nos compramos un perro? - No vamos a comprar ningún perro. Adoptemos uno. Hay muchos perros abandonados que necesitan un hogar.

The more he thought about it, the more his childhood seemed like a cavity in somebody else's tooth--unhealthy, but no big deal, at least not to him.

Grandma Natasha was sitting in the tent watching public service announcements on TV. They were showing a blond model in a bikini doing the backstroke in a river of blood flowing along Arlozorov Street. "She's not a real blonde," Grandma Natasha grumbled, pointing at the model. "She has it bleached.

Except that when it came to choosing between smiles and thanks on the one hand, and the good of society on the other, this driver knew what it had to be.

when they started moving, he looked in the rear-view mirror and gave Eddie a sad wink, which somehow made the whole thing almost bearable.

That's when he finally understood that of all the things the angel had told him, nothing was true. That he wasn't even an angel, just a liar with wings.

Say," Uzi pressed on, "is it true that when you people go out on a job they promise you seventy nymphomaniac virgins in Kingdom Come? All for you, solico?" "Sure, they promise," Nasser said, "and look what it got me. Lukewarm vodka." "So you're just a sucker in the end, eh, ya Nasser," Uzi gloated. "Sure thing." Nasser nodded. "And you, what did they promise you?

A waiter there told me that during the war, people who came in had a hard time choosing the right word when they wanted to order coffee. The word coffee, he explained, is different in Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian, and every innocent word choice was fraught with threatening political connotations. "To avoid trouble," he'd said, "people started ordering espresso, which is a neutral Italian word, and overnight, we stopped serving coffee here and served only espresso.

pragmatically

Everyone comes to heaven in their own way.

too, would never ever go visit their country. Because when he went with his parents to Germany fifty years ago everything looked nice, but it ended in hell.

People have short memories, he said, especially when bad things are concerned. People tend to forget, he said, but you won't forget.