J Howard Jacobson Quotes

#1. But what is the imagination for if not tto grasp how the world feels to those who don't think what you think?

Howard Jacobson

#2. All those words of praise they use for novels - spare, economical. Why should I shell out £17 for economical?

Howard Jacobson

#3. But you tell me when there has ever been a reign of terror that wasn't instigated by intellectuals and presided over by someone possessed of the madness of the artist.

Howard Jacobson

#4. I'm a Jewish Jane Austen.

Howard Jacobson

#5. A waitress, bringing Finkler more hot water, interrupted Treslove's answer. Finkler always asked for more hot water no matter how much hot water had already been brought. It was his way of asserting power, Treslove thought. No doubt Nietzsche, too, ordered more hot water than he needed.

Howard Jacobson

#6. History's lesson is that bullies ultimately defeat themselves.

Howard Jacobson

#7. Do not hope for too much. But do not settle for too little.

Howard Jacobson

#8. But aunties are equivocal figures of affection, wicked and unreliable, pretending love only so long as they are short of love themselves, and then off.

Howard Jacobson

#9. You can't have a church town without belief and you can't have belief without intolerance.

Howard Jacobson

#10. He would come to school balancing his night's dreams like an acrobat bearing a human pyramid on his shoulders.

Howard Jacobson

#11. At any age there is future one doesn't have. Never enough life when you are happy, that was the thing. Never so much bliss that you can't take a little more.

Howard Jacobson

#12. I took the route favoured by all worldly failures and became a spiritual success.

Howard Jacobson

#13. There is no word for the sound a life makes.

Howard Jacobson

#14. If that made him heavy company sometimes, so be it. Who decreed that life was to be one long rowdy masquerade (punctuated with those little pets of melancholy indulged by a crowd who made a religion of their feelings)?

Howard Jacobson

#15. That was what was cruel about superficial change: it exposed what could never change.

Howard Jacobson

#16. What it is to see, what liberties are taken when one looks, where looking leaves one vis-a-vis one's subject, or how far looking ultimately becomes one's subject - these are important questions.

Howard Jacobson

#17. That's how vilification works. The victim ingests the views of his tormentor. If that's how I look, that's what I must be.

Howard Jacobson

#18. Aren't all dreads half desires?

Howard Jacobson

#19. Why is dissatisfaction taken to be a mark of failing powers and patience, when it might just as easily be understood as a proper judgment on a foolish world?

Howard Jacobson

#20. Could that be why Treslove so often found himself alone? Was he protecting himself against the companioned happiness he longed for because he dreaded how he would feel when it was taken from him?

Howard Jacobson

#21. Before he met Finkler, Treslove had never met a Jew. Not knowingly at least. He supposed a Jew would be like the word Jew - small and dark and beetling. A secret person. But Finkler was almost orange in colour and spilled out of his clothes.

Howard Jacobson

#22. That was what living a serious life meant, wasn't it, honoring the gravity of things by not pretending they were light?

Howard Jacobson

#23. Whoever spoke of a wise lover? The wiser the lover, the longer ago he stopped loving.

Howard Jacobson

#24. Don't I look after you when you're ill?' 'You do. You're marvellous to me when I'm ill. It's when I'm well that you're no use.

Howard Jacobson

#25. But you don't always have to ask to know.

Howard Jacobson

#26. Was it better then - measuring the loss - not to know happiness at all? Better to go through life waiting for what never came, because that way you had less to mourn?

Howard Jacobson

#27. The girls pick snouts from the pack as though they're chocolates and it matters which they select.

Howard Jacobson

#28. He let himself be storm-tossed, riding her billowing sea. When she held him like this he could see nothing, but the colour of his blindness was the colour of waves breaking

Howard Jacobson

#29. In the matrimonial life of the Jewish male every day is Yom Kippur.

Howard Jacobson

#30. Because art, for all its adventuresomeness, is also capable of being the most recidivist of human activities, forever falling back in reaction to what was itself a reaction to something else.

Howard Jacobson