Nathan Englander > Quotes

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

“How terribly unfair that his whole self aches because of the shape of a shoulder, the soft line of a hip.”
― Nathan Englander, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

“Harder than waking from a nightmare was trying to wake herself into one.”
― Nathan Englander, The Ministry of Special Cases

“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.”
― Nathan Englander, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

“The Jewish day begins in the calm of evening, when it won't shock the system with its arrival.”
― Nathan Englander, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges

“It is hard to know what a person would and wouldn't do in any specific instance. And you, spoiled child, apply the rules of civilization to a boy who had only seen its opposite. Maybe the fault for those deaths lies in a system designed for the killing of Tendlers that failed to do its job. An error, a slip that allowed a Tendler, no longer fit, back loose in the world.”
― Nathan Englander, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

“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.”
― Nathan Englander, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

“When my mother told my father what had happened, he didn't want to believe it. "Nobody ever wants to believe what happens to the Jews," she said, "not even us.”
― Nathan Englander, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

“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.”
― Nathan Englander, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

“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.”
― Nathan Englander, Dinner at the Center of the Earth

“These are hopeful stories from hopeless times. Without them the grief of this nation would tip it into the sea.”
― Nathan Englander, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories

“Elke zomer worden de oude mensen kleiner terwijl de kinderen groter worden. Volgens Josh is er maar een bepaalde lengte beschikbaar op aarde en verwisselen de centimeters alleen van eigenaar.”
― Nathan Englander, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

“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.”
― Nathan Englander, Dinner at the Center of the Earth

“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.”
― Nathan Englander, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories

“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.”
― Nathan Englander, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories

“Only remember, if you don't find what you need... in this life it's permissible to forgive oneself too.”
― Nathan Englander

“Čovjekovo pravo biće pokazuje se u tri slučaja. Kad je posrijedi novac, kad govori u srdžbi i kad je pijan.”
― Nathan Englander, The Ministry of Special Cases

“You rented an apartment with its own escape route?” “I did,” Z says. “It’s not so paranoid when you use it to do just that.”
― Nathan Englander, Dinner at the Center of the Earth

“You wouldn't leave me?" he'd asked her honestly afraid.
...In answer, Miri had taken her time before sharing a kind of warning. "I can tell you I'd never leave you. I can also tell you that what makes any marriage work is the knowledge that no relationship should be taken for granted. That there is always a line where the one who'd never leave you is suddenly gone.”
― Nathan Englander, kaddish.com

“This period in your life, it feels like it's forever. But, if you're lucky, life is long and each of these forevers will oneday seem fleeting.”
― Nathan Englander, kaddish.com

“The information. It's out there, Rebbe. This part is not a sin.”
― Nathan Englander, kaddish.com

“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.”
― Nathan Englander

“What I’m trying to say, whether you want to take it seriously or not, is that you can’t build Judaism only on the foundation of one terrible crime. It is about this obsession with the Holocaust as a necessary sign of identity. As your only educational tool. Because for the children, there is no connection otherwise. Nothing Jewish that binds.”
― Nathan Englander, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

“This time, as with every time, when the fighting starts it will be more terrible than the fight that came before. Always it is the worst, the most violent, the least restrained, a steady escalation. The singular rule.”
― Nathan Englander, Dinner at the Center of the Earth

“There is only one thing I can guess in a house with no personal details of any kind, and a man who tells me only stories from when he was young. You're a spy? Yes?'
'Sort of,' is Z's unsatisfactory answer.
'Sort of?'
'The term. It really gets misused.' And trying to appease her, Z says, 'I mean, colloquially.”
― Nathan Englander, Dinner at the Center of the Earth

“Author reads for Seattle; it has always been his city. He reads for the buyer, who has always believed. Author reads one more time to his old man. He smiles at his reader, and reads on through the tears. Author reads on. And Author reads on.”
― Nathan Englander, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories

“And once the invasion begins? There’s no knowing how and when, or even if, the bloodshed will ever end. Only that both sides will battle for justice, killing each other in the name of those freshly killed, honoring the men who died avenging those who, before them, died avenging.”
― Nathan Englander, Dinner at the Center of the Earth

“There are secrets behind everything that God creates.”
― Nathan Englander, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges: Stories