The Finkler Question Quotes

“How do you go on knowing that you will never again - not ever, ever - see the person you have loved? How do you survive a single hour, a single minute, a single second of that knowledge? How do you hold yourself together?”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“So many unhappy women out there. Such a sea of female misery.”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“Hephzibah normally left the dishes until the next day. Piled up in the sink so that it was near impossible to fill a kettle. And what the sink wouldn't take would stay on the kitchen table. Treslove liked that about her. She didn't believe they had to clean up after every excess. There wasn't a price to pay for pleasure.”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“At a certain age men began to shrink, and yet it was precisely at that age that their trousers became too short for them.”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“It's never over till it's over with a friend.”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“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, The Finkler Question

“Was he a bad man or just a foolish one? He didn't feel bad to himself. As a husband he believed himself to be essentially good and loyal. It just wasn't written in a man's nature to be monogamous, that was all. And he owed something to his nature even when his nature was at odds with his desire, which was to stay at home and cherish his wife. It was his nature – all nature, the rule of nature – that was the bastard, not him.”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“I suspect you're thinking of Pascal,' Finkler said, finally.'Only he said the opposite. He said you might as well wager on God because that way, even if He doesn't exist, you've nothing to lose. Whereas if you wager against God and He does exist...'
'You're in the shit.”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“T. S. Eliot told Auden tht the reason he played patience night after night was that it was the nearest thing to being dead.”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“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, The Finkler Question

“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, The Finkler Question

“Aren't all dreads half desires?”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“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, The Finkler Question

“to bar communication between intellectuals, who are always our best hope of peace, is particularly self-defeating and inane. It declares, inter alia, that we have a) made up our minds about what we think, b) closed our minds to what others think, and c) chosen to go on hearing nothing with which we happen to disagree.”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“He would come to school balancing his night's dreams like an acrobat bearing a human pyramid on his shoulders.”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“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, The Finkler Question

“By what twisted sophistication of argument do you harry people with violence off your land and then think yourself entitled to make high-minded stipulations as to where they may go now you are rid of them and how they may provide for their future welfare? I am an Englishman who loves England, but do you suppose that it too is not a racist country? Do you know of any country whose recent history is not blackened by prejudice and hate against somebody? So what empowers racists in their own right to sniff out racism in others? Only from a world from which Jews believe they have nothing to fear will they consent to learn lessons in humanity. Until then, the Jewish state’s offer of safety to Jews the world over yes, Jews first – while it might not be equitable cannot sanely be constructed as racist. I can understand why a Palestinian might say it feels racist to him, though he too inherits a history of disdain for people of other persuasions to himself, but not you, madam, since you present yourself as a bleeding-heart, conscience-pricked representative of the very Gentile world from which Jews, through no fault of their own, have been fleeing for centuries...”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“Jew-hating was back-of course Jew-hating was back. Soon it would be full-blown Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism. These things didn’t go away. There was nowhere for them to go. They where indestructible, non-biodegradable. They waited in the great rubbish tip that was the human heart.”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“Come over,’ he said. ‘I’ll order in Chinese.’
‘You speak Chinese now?’
‘Funny guy, Libor. Be here at eight.’
‘You sure you’re up for it?’
‘I’m a philosopher, I’m not sure about anything.’..”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“History’s lesson is that bullies ultimately defeat themselves.”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“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, The Finkler Question

“A phrase such as ‘the idea derived from evolution that ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis’ for example, not impossibly intricate in itself but somehow resistant to effort, as though it triggered something obdurate and even delinquent in his mind. Or the promise to look at an argument from three points of view, each of which had five salient features, the first of which had four distinguishable aspects. It was like discovering that a supposedly sane person with whom one had been enjoying a perfect normal conversation was in fact quite mad. Or, if not mad, sadistic.”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“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, The Finkler Question

“Just when you've overcome the grief, you realise you are left with the loneliness.”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“Faith wasn’t a mystery to him; the mystery to him was holding on to faith. He”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“you might as well wager on God because that way, even if He doesn’t exist, you’ve nothing to lose. Whereas if you wager against God and He does exist . . .”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“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, The Finkler Question

“The ASHamed Jews. They’re a bit like the Lost Boys. It’s all down to careless mothering if you ask me.”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“he said he found some of Jane Austen’s heroines a touch effervescent for his taste – not Emma, of course not Emma – preferring Anne Elliot, no, loving, really loving Anne Elliot.”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

“Archaeology, Concrete Poetry, Media and Communications, Festival and Theatre Administration, Comparative Religion, Stage Set and Design, the Russian Short Story, Politics and Gender. On finishing his studies – and it was never entirely clear when and whether he had finished his studies, on account of no one at the university being certain how many modules made a totality – Treslove found himself with a degree so unspecific that all he could do with it was accept a graduate traineeship at the BBC.”
― Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question