Quotes from Shalom Auslander

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.

Si había que deshacerse, que fuera así: aceptando que somos todos tontos del culo. Tal vez entonces perderíamos el respecto a los tontos del culo de nuestros antepasados y abandonaríamos nuestras tradiciones de mierda, cuestionaríamos nuestras creencias, nacionalidades e identidades de mierda, borraríamos nuestras fronteras de mierda y conviviríamos todos juntos, todo lo bien que puede esperarse de una panda de tontos del culo.

Pero, ¿qué es eso de país? ¿En serio seguimos jugando a ese juego? ¿Todavía no hemos pasado esa pantalla, como especie? ¿Qué es un país? Dime, Séptimo. ¿Qué es una patria? Es una ficción, hermano, una ficción peligrosa.

Séptimo solía preguntarse con precaución si terminaría contrayendo el odio de su madre, si heredaría su intolerancia, como un virus, como un defecto de nacimiento, a pesar de sus esfuerzos por resistir, una especie de síndrome del gilipollas fetal.

Suck is life,[...]:you get to a point, one day, where you are hoping to find crap; where the best possible outcome of all possible outcomes would be the discovery, praise Jesus, of a pile of shit

Roads are no place for naive chickens dreaming of nirvana.

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.

He imagined the scene at the gates of heaven to be not unlike that at the finish line of a long and grueling marathon: everyone high-fiving, hugging, collapsing, elated that it's over, yes, it's finally over, pouring cups of water over one another's heads and saying, Holy shit, dude, that was fucking brutal. I am never doing that again.

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.

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.

You never see a lion crucifyng another lion. You never see a bear just randomly murdering salmon for anything besides food; bears don't form armies, invade rivers, tear the heads off male salmon, rape the female salmon, and enslave their salmon children. It is finished, to Kugel, sounded a hell of a lot like Fuck all of you motherfuckers.

Hiding from genocide inside a Jew's attic, thought Kugel, is like hiding from a lion inside a gazelle.

It couldn't be an all-bad world, could it, not with birds who warble and call? Maybe that was the secret - to find the few things that made life just a fraction better, and to focus on those. Bird warbles. Peach fuzz. Puppies barking as if they're full grown dogs. Nothing great, certainly nothing to justify the rest of it, but enough to keep you going.

Vans are the vehicles of murderers. Serial Killers. Rapists. Thieves. Nothing good ever happens in a van. Police should be allowed to arrest van drivers without cause. The van is the cause, asshole.

The Kugels, Kugel hated to admit, might just have to, in the event of genocide, rely on the kindness of strangers. Mother used to say: I can name six million people who relied on the kindness of strangers.

He took the diary from Mother's hand and turned it over. The heartbreaking something, he read, of a tragic whatever.

Maybe when I'd dead, he thought. Maybe when I'm dead I'll get some goddamned sleep.

His intelligence only exacerbated the guilt Kugel felt for bringing him into the world. It was one thing to have condemned a child to life, that was criminal enough, but life was a sentence more easily served by fools.

There is hurt in this world. There is pain. Hoping there won't be only makes it worse.

What a world, thought Kugel; whoever you were, wherever you were, whatever time of the day or night, you could open your back door and call out I know you're out there motherfucker, and nine times out of ten you'd be right.

I'm down here, trying to live, trying to deal with the real world, while you're hiding, bitching, fucking everyone's shit up but your own, so shut up, just shut the fuck up. Thirty-two million copies, thirty-two million copies, that's what you got for your pain. What do I get for mine? What does anyone get for theirs? Nothing, not a fucking thing, they get another goddamned day of it and another goddamned day of it after that, so just shut up, will you? Will you just shut up?

I kind of like it up here, Kugel said. It's got a certain fatalistic charm, a certain je ne sais fucked.

What's the harm in forgetting? What does remembering do? Kugel had read that the war in the Balkans was referred to as the War of the Grandmothers; that after 50 years of peace, it was the grandmothers who reminded their offspring to hate each other, the grandmothers who reminded them of past atrocities, of indignities long gone. Never forget! shouted the grandmothers. So their grandchildren remembered, and their grandchildren died.

Oh no he does not! He does NOT read James Freaking Patterson. Our salvation - our provider…we must be out of our minds. I happen to find Patterson thought provoking and suspenseful. You what? Did you just say you find James Patterson thought provoking and suspenseful? Jesus Christ open your eyes! Are you so desperate to believe that you're defending James Patterson?!