Nathan Englander Quotes

43. My couch is 92 inches; it's a deep green three-cushion. It seats hundreds. But that's not why I got it. I got it because, lying down the long way, in the spooning-in-front-of-a-movie way, in the head-to-toe lying with a pair of lamps burning and a pair of people reading, it fits me and another – it fits her – really well.

These are hopeful stories from hopeless times. Without them the grief of this nation would tip it into the sea.

Harder than waking from a nightmare was trying to wake herself into one.

I also knew that the deep rumble rolling through us was only nerves, a sensitivity to imagined repercussion, as if a sound were built into revenge.

You cannot learn to curse like an American.

And we know, until they stop their terrible motion, until they cease swooping and darting and banging into the walls, until they alight, come to rest, exhausted, spent, there is nothing at all we can do.

The Jewish day begins in the calm of evening, when it won't shock the system with its arrival.

How terribly unfair that his whole self aches because of the shape of a shoulder, the soft line of a hip.

They went off to the Holy Land and went from Orthodox to ultra-Orthodox, which to me sounds like a repackaged detergent–ORTHODOX ULTRA, now with more deep-healing power.

He was surprised, as always, to witness a new degradation, to find another display of wretchedness original enough to bring tears to his eyes. He took a deep breath and ignored the sense of injustice, a rich man's emotion, a feeling Mendel had given up the liberty of experiencing horrors and horrors before.

There were new words for everything in their dead language put back to use. New words for the jets and their radar systems. New words for the tanks and the radios inside. But for this, for the hammer and beat of the forge, the Bible still sufficed.

No, no," Arnie says. "Fondle--fondle is to touch. Everything sounds Yiddish to you. Far-fetched, far-flung..." "Farflung is Yiddish." "No," Arnie says, "it's not.

If Z had only known in his perfectly lovely two rooms in Paris what he'd come to know in his single 6x8 block somewhere, he guessed, just outside Tel Aviv. If he'd had an inkling in that breezy French apartment of what true boredom felt like and true loneliness, and true limbo - what it might actually be like to be locked up, hidden away without hope. If he'd tasted real madness at that point, he'd not have decided that he was so bored and so crazy that, without TV or Radio or a suitably advanced French, that, at the very least, he deserved a taste of the night air and something decent to read, and maybe, if the shop was still open, a decent bottle of wine.

I'd much prefer my books to shoes ... In the summer I sometimes take walks without shoes but never without a novel.