The Finkler Question
Howard Jacobson
Top 10 Best 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?”
“So many unhappy women out there. Such a sea of female misery.”
“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.”
“At a certain age men began to shrink, and yet it was precisely at that age that their trousers became too short for them.”
“It's never over till it's over with a friend.”
“But what is the imagination for if not tto grasp how the world feels to those who don't think what you think?”
“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.”
“T. S. Eliot told Auden tht the reason he played patience night after night was that it was the nearest thing to being dead.”
“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.”
“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.”
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Book Keywords:
old-age, love, infidelity, trousers, women, death, friendship, god, spirituality, loss, pascal-s-wager, death-of-a-loved-one
