Book of Numbers Quotes

“All books have to be researched, but readable books have their research buried.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers

“I have what’s called an addiction to Ativan, and Xanax. Which is preferable to admitting to an aversion to planes.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“My necessities were books. I read a book at school, another to and from school, yet another at the beach, which was the closest escape from my father’s dying. Though when I walked alone it was far. Though I wasn’t allowed to walk alone when younger—so young that my concern wasn’t the danger to myself but to the books I’d bring, because they weren’t mine, they were everyone’s, entrusted to me in return for exemplary behavior, and if I lost even a single book, or let even its corner get nicked by a jitney, the city would come, the city itself, and lock me up in that grim brick jail that, in every feature, resembled the library.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“But the for serious offline impact of 09/11 was the continual contact, continuous contact, it encouraged. On 09/12 everyone went out and bought phones. The mobiles, the cells. Suddenly, to lose touch was to die, and the only prayer left for anyone who felt buried whether under information or debris was for a signal strong enough to let their last words outlive them on voicemail.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“If you’re reading this on a screen, fuck off. I’ll only talk if I’m gripped with both hands.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“NYers are cruel enough to neglect a bond due only to trackwork on the L.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“The chips were the enablers, limited pellets of silicon that served an apparently unlimited range of functions, as like a single snackfood delivering the tastes of chocolate, vanilla, pork rind, popcorn, pretzel, and chip in every bitesized bite.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“No one around me was doing anything, even making conversation. They were all just perfectly inert, laid out prone or supine as if submitting to autopsy or dissection. Only the dead or the lowest of species can bask, I’m convinced.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“Congress was just a gray repository that got its OS replaced with each election.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“The best thing about search is you always find what you want. The worst thing about search is you never find what you do not want.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers

“se state leggendo questa storia su uno schermo, andate a fanculo. Parlerò solo se sfogliato come si deve.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers

“The only thing worse than an Aussie or Kiwi intonation is its intermittent use. When it's Auckland talking, or Melbourne, fine. But when a snatch of downunder drawl erupts from the mouth of a Euro, it's like blood in your urine.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers

“Death is the only monopoly. Nothing can compete.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers

“How am I, a writer, supposed to feel about having lost you to a reader?”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers

“Lift up the hem of verbiage, peek below its frillies – what’s exposed? the hairy truth?”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers

“By the highway, the Hudson—the library books straining at their delibags, corners poking. Straining my arms, throttling my hands, the numb rewards of literacy.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“All of Iowa must be campuses and crops.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“A whole roasted lamb—stuffed with lamb sausages, organ and glandbreads, dried fruits and currants, tomato/garlic/onion mush, the entirety cardamomated, corianderized, cumined, cloved—was brought out on a spit, danced around. The carcassbearers were women, further gorgeous bursting Slavs,”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“A whiff of brine, a swank trestle adumbrant, Loading Only No Standing, 14th & 10th—this was Tetration’s NY HQ. I went through the doors and stood facing anything but the street, until a Tetbot treaded over to make inquiries. I stood behind a rubberplant. The Tetbot reversed and treaded after me. It was a clownwigged trashcan that barely reached my lowest hanging ball yet without compunction it was demanding my credentials: Tetrateer? or Tetguest?”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“May through to June I spent my time deciding how to spend my time, which is the first, second, and third through nine thousand seven hundred and griftyfifth items on the agenda of every writer, or neurotic. I was getting ahead of myself, fretting whether the book would have to have notes or sources cited, fretting whether I’d be allowed to decide anything at all.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“Let this meeting be as cryptic—as representative/nonrepresentative—as the Arameans, a people that never had a land of their own but still managed to leave behind their language—the only thing they left behind, their language. Aramaic. Ha lachma anya. This is the bread of affliction. Eli Eli lama shavaktani? Father, Father, why didn’t Christ quote the Psalms in Hebrew—was he that inept, or does excruciation always call for the vernacular?”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“As for yours truly, I’ve been sitting with my laptop atop a pillow on my lap to keep those wireless hotspot waveparticles from reaching my genitals and frying my sperm, searching up—with my employer’s technology—myself, and Rach.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“The time and/or distance required for luxuries to become staples, for wants to become needs, consumption to consume. London’s just around the corner, Paris can be ordered, ensuite, round the clock. Our access is bewildering, not just beyond imagination, but becoming imagination, bewildering twice over. We can only search the found, find the searched, and charge it to our room.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers

“Book of Numbers is a missile launched against the Internet”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers

“there was Frankfurt's skyline, like apocalypse does Dallas. Your friendly neighborhood global banking headquarters - Deutsche Bank's logo of a blue square slit diagonally has always read to me like the desolate vagina of a war widow.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers

“..."subject" and "genre" are distinctions necessary for shelving a book, but necessarily ruinous distinctions for writing a book deserving of shelving”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers

“All who read us are read.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“In the future we would have total storage, all of us would, our media libraries would dematerialize and just float above us, books would no longer sit on the shelves reminding us that we had not read them, music and TV and film formats would no longer clutter the den reminding us of all we had not yet listened to or watched. Also reducing domestic mess, the many devices on which we might ever decide to read or listen or watch would become integrated, merged, fewer.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“All human language could be determined through this medium, which could not be expressed in any human language, and that was its perfection. The more a thing was clicked, the more perfect that thing would be. We would equate ourselves with that.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers: A Novel

“In the future we would have total storage, all of us would, our media libraries would dematerialise and just float above us, books would no longer sit on the shelves reminding us that we had not read them, music and TV and film formats would no longer clutter the den reminding us of all we had not yet listened to or watched.”
― Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers