Jacob Appel > Jacob's Quotes

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#1

“Nothing sells tombstones like a Girl Scout in uniform.”
― Jacob M. Appel, Scouting for the Reaper

tags: girl-scouts, humor

8 likes

#2

“One thing led to another. That was the only way to explain how Arnold Brinkman, who considered both professional sports and young children unjustifiable, had ended up at Yankee Stadium with a nine-year-old boy.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up

tags: baseball, humor

4 likes

#3

“Nixon’s offences had been so long in the past, so much part of a different era that he now seemed like some lovable but bigoted uncle you tolerated at Christmas and Thanksgiving.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up

tags: humor, humorous, nixon

5 likes

#4

“Harlem sleeps late.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Biology of Luck

tags: big-apple, gotham, harlem, new-york, new-york-city

6 likes

#5

“Battery Park resonates with lust as the sun approaches its zenith. A primal impulse takes hold of the young couples strolling the gravel walkways, the newlyweds who have paused to admire DeModica’s bronze bull, the truant teens laid out on the cool grass. Maybe because all flesh tantalizes in the early summer, in the right light, or because, at this time of year, there is more flesh exposed, midriffs, cleavage, inner thighs, the park is suddenly transformed into a dynamo of panting and groping. This desire is not the tender affection of evening, the wistful intimacy of the twilight’s last gleam. It is raw, concupiscent hunger.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Biology of Luck

tags: love, sex, summer

8 likes

#6

“Starshine’s greatest challenge is deciding whether a woman is too young to soothe or too old to shame. Handling the men is much easier. They may feign interest in figures and photos, but their underlying interest is for breasts and thighs. A generous smile often adds an extra zero to a check; an additional inch of exposed cleavage can clothe five Laotian children. The vast majority of these men do not expect to purchase Starshine’s favors. They are husbands, fathers, pillars of the community, the sort of upstanding middle-aged patriarchs who would rather castrate their libidos than compromise their reputations, and even if their three-digit donations could earn them a quickie with the canvasser, they would deny themselves the pleasure.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Biology of Luck

tags: canvassing, marketing, new-york-city, sex

3 likes

#7

“Another family crisis: The rabbit goes blind.”
― Jacob M. Appel, Scouting for the Reaper

tags: humor, rabbits, short-story

2 likes

#8

“Know your load. That’s rule numero uno in this business, which is why I make them count the penguins out in front of me one at a time. I’m not going to be the schmuck who shows up in Orlando two
birds short of a dinner party....I know I’m pulling out of Houston with exactly forty-two Gentoo penguins, seventeen Jamaican land iguanas, four tuataras from New Zealand, and a pair of rare, civet-like mammals called linsangs. No more, no less.”
― Jacob M. Appel, Scouting for the Reaper

tags: animals, humor, penguins, truck-drivers, zoo

4 likes

#9

“The boss is never your friend, even if you're sleeping with him.”
― Jacob M. Appel

tags: humor, sex, work

2 likes

#10

“Be optimistic. Always put on clean underwear if you're going on a date.”
― Jacob M. Appel

tags: dating, humor, sex

4 likes

#11

“If you give a man a hammer, he thinks he can solve all problems by pounding. Well, God gave men penises....”
― Jacob M. Appel

tags: hammer, humor, men, sex

5 likes

#12

“If God wanted teenagers to be abstinent, puberty would begin at twenty.”
― Jacob M. Appel

tags: puberty, teenagers

1 likes

#13

“Patriotism is being convinced your country is better because you were born in it.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up

tags: american-exceptionalism, birth, nationalism, patriotism, patriots

5 likes

#14

“Even a poor tour guide is entitled to some happiness.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Biology of Luck

tags: fiddler-on-the-roof, happiness, love, tour-guide

2 likes

#15

“You delude yourself that you live in a free country because you never test the boundaries of that freedom.”
― Jacob Appel

1 likes

#16

“The only thing more difficult than persuading someone else to start having sex with you is persuading yourself to stop.”
― Jacob M. Appel

tags: dating, dating-advice, dating-tips, humor, humorous, men, persuasion, romance, sex, sexuality, sexy-humor, women

15 likes

#17

“Maybe life involves the pairing of unsuitable people, those who wait and those who keep others waiting, and the key to happiness is finding the one person with whom you share the same internal chronometer.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Biology of Luck

tags: chronometer, dating, dating-advice, dating-tips, happiness, life, life-lessons, love, mating, sex, waiting

32 likes

#18

“She remembers this phrase from his final months of law school, when he brought home the books on starting up a business. He'd read ravenously for several weeks and then predicted: "Well, darling, we're going to be rich." Now he slaps shut the last of his books and announces, with equal assurance: "We're all going to die.”
― Jacob Appel, Radiazione

tags: literary-fiction, mystery

4 likes

#19

“If you want to find out what a man is to the bottom, give him power. Any man can stand adversity — only a great man can stand prosperity. It is the glory of Abraham Lincoln that he never abused power only on the side of mercy”
― Robert Ingersoll

tags: adversity, character, power

3244 likes

#20

“I used to dream of true love; now I'm open to false, but convincing....”
― Jacob M. Appel

tags: aging, dating, expectations, love, love-advice, lower-standards, relationship-advice, relationships, sex, truth

4 likes

#21

“I can handle being married for my money; it's being married for my life insurance that gives me pause....”
― Jacob M. Appel

3 likes

#22

“Life is nasty, brutish, and short. Death is easy.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Biology of Luck

tags: inspirational-attitude

6 likes

#23

“Nothing spices up one's sex life like having a partner.”
― Jacob M. Appel, Scouting for the Reaper

tags: dating, humor, humorous-quotations, love, lovemaking, men, partner, partnership, relationships, romance, sex, sex-life, sexuality, sexy-humor, women

8 likes

#24

“A century ago, people laughed at the notion that we were descended from monkeys. Today, the individuals most offended by that claim are the monkeys.”
― Jacob M. Appel, Scouting for the Reaper

tags: apes, biologists, biology, darwin, evolution, evolutionary-biology, humor, moneys, primate, primates, progress, science, scopes, scopes-monkey-trial

4 likes

#25

“An American man endowed with sufficient wealth can purchase anything, but an American woman endowed with sufficient beauty does not need to.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Biology of Luck

5 likes

#26

“Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

315 likes

#27

“Death speaks: There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling and said, Master, just now when I was in the market-place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

tags: death, humor

35 likes

#28

“This is how most stories end in the hospital. Not with crash carts and sirens and electric shocks to the chest, but with an empty room, a crisp white bed, silence.”
― Jacob M. Appel, Phoning Home

tags: death, death-and-dying, health, health-care, hospital, hospitals, jacob-m-appel, medicine, medicine-doctor, silence

22 likes

#29

“Arnold had never given much thought to whether or not he loved America—but now it seemed pretty obvious to him that he didn’t. Not in the way Nathan Hale had loved America. Or even in the way his late father, a Dutch-Jewish refugee, had loved America. In fact, he found the idea of sacrificing his life for his country somewhat abhorrent. Moreover, it wasn’t that he disliked abstract loyalties in general. He loved New York, for instance: Senegalese takeout at three a.m., and strolling through the Botanical Gardens on the first crisp day of autumn, and feeding the peacocks at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. If Manhattan were invaded—if New Jersey were to send an expeditionary force of militiamen across the Hudson River—he’d willingly take up arms to defend his city. He also loved Sandpiper Key in Florida, where they owned a time-share, and maybe Brown University, where he’d spent five years of graduate school. But the United States? No one could mistake his qualified praise for love.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up

tags: america, brown-university, country, jacob-m-appel, nathan-hale, nation, new-york, patriotism, unpatriotic

0 likes

#30

“To the bankrupt poet, to the jilted lover, to anyone who yearns to elude the doubt within and the din without, the tidal strait between Manhattan Island and her favorite suburb offers the specious illusion of easy death. Melville prepared for the plunge from the breakwater on the South Street promenade, Whitman at the railing of the outbound ferry, both men redeemed by some Darwinian impulse, maybe some epic vision, which enabled them to change leaden water into lyric wine. Hart Crane rejected the limpid estuary for the brackish swirl of the Caribbean Sea. In each generation, from Washington Irving’s to Truman Capote’s, countless young men of promise and talent have examined the rippling foam between the nation’s literary furnace and her literary playground, questioning whether the reams of manuscript in their Brooklyn lofts will earn them garlands in Manhattan’s salons and ballrooms, wavering between the workroom and the water. And the city had done everything in its power to assist these men, to ease their affliction and to steer them toward the most judicious of decisions. It has built them a bridge.”
― Jacob M. Appel, The Biology of Luck

tags: bankrupt, brooklyn, brooklyn-bridge, east-river, failure, herman-melville, hopelessness, jacob-m-appel, manhattan, melville, new-york-city, suicide, walt-whitman, whitman

4 likes

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