Quotes from Shalom Auslander

Written with passion, honesty, humor, and a stubborn, rebellious optimism, Dear Marcus is like nothing I've ever read. When a bullet in the back told Jerry McGill not to go on, Jerry went on-smiling.

...the greatest source of misery in the world, the greatest cause of anguish and hatred and sadness and death, was neither disease nor race nor religion. It was hope.

My point is that death is more tragic than life, than any life, because every life has hope of some kind.

Kugel was a firm believer that death was not always a bad thing - that life often reached such levels of crapitude that dying was preferable to living.

My point is that death is more tragic than life, than any life, because every life has hope of some kind.

This, said Mother, as she handed him a piece of dry, tasteless matzoh, is the bread of our affliction. Where, young Kugel wondered, is the seven-layer cake of our salvation? Where is the muffin of our mirth? Where is our no-longer-reduced-to-jelly doughnut?

You can hope all you want for a happy ending, but sometimes, like it or not, the guy writing your story is working on a tragedy; you may not even be the main character.

Kugel awoke early the next morning, turning his face from the harsh rays of intruding sunlight that stretched across the room like some goddamned thing that stretches across some other goddamned thing. Why did children always draw the sun smiling? he wondered. It's a giant ball of fire, kids. It's rage and fury. Whatever it's doing, it isn't fucking smiling.

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.

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.

Every Jew was the last Jew; Tevye the Terminal, every single one. Yet, Kugel couldn't help but observe, in all that time - no last Jew. There had been a last Assyrian. There had been a last Ammonite. There had been a last Babylonian, a last Mesopotamian, a last of the Mohicans. But no last Jew.

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.

This is the term we've been using lately: theological abuse. It involves adults, known or unknown to the underage victim, telling them a Lunatic runs the world, that He's spying on them, that He's waiting for them to break a rule.

I believe in a personal God; everything I do, He takes personally.

my mother put me in the box and made it very clear that her love was conditional upon my remaining in the box.

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.

Kugel wondered if in these days of the Internet you would even need a Miep Gies anymore, if you could make it through a genocide these days with just a smartphone and a credit card, and he was hopeful that in the event of another Holocaust, he would have some sort of broadband Internet access.

The people who raised me will say that I am not religious. They are mistaken. What I am not is observant. But I am painfully, cripplingly, incurably, miserably religious, and I have watched lately, dumbfounded and distraught, as around the world, more and more people seem to be finding Gods, each one more hateful and bloodthirsty than the next, as I'm doing my best to lose Him. I'm failing miserably.

L'uomo fa progetti e Dio ride. Che cazzo di stupido aforisma è? Vuol dire che Lui è uno stronzo? Che fine ha fatto L'uomo fa progetti e Dio fa del Suo meglio perché questi progetti si realizzino? In quale religione c'è un'espressione del genere?

Nations are fictions, and I don't die for fictions.

We have survived everything but freedom! he would fulminate from his seat at the end of the dinner table, banging the table with his fist and causing the silverware jump. War, hatred, violence, opression–all these combined could never do to us what Coca-Cola and Disney and Burger King have. We have lost our way! We have intermarried, we have assimilated! We have bought into the American Dream, but that dream is someone else's, and the dream they dream is a dream of our destruction.

Then again, isn't tradition just another word for that particularly religious, self-righteous, non-thinking inertia that propels so many to extremes they might not ever have engaged in had they stopped to actually consider, to weigh, to examine?

I lifted two hundred pounds today, Tenth once bragged to Fourth after a triumphant afternoon at the gym, flexing his arms and chest. Why? Fourth had asked. We have machines to do that for us now. It was a genuine inquiry, but Tenth had tackled him and held him in a headlock until Fourth admitted that lifting heavy weights was a reasonable pursuit despite mankind's significant mechanical progress.)

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