Hope: A Tragedy
Shalom Auslander
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Roads are no place for naive chickens dreaming of nirvana.”
“...the greatest source of misery in the world, the greatest cause of anguish and hatred and sadness and death, was neither disease nor race nor religion. It was hope.”
“He imagined the scene at the gates of heaven to be not unlike that at the finish line of a long and grueling marathon: everyone high-fiving, hugging, collapsing, elated that it’s over, yes, it’s finally over, pouring cups of water over one another’s heads and saying, Holy shit, dude, that was fucking brutal. I am never doing that again.”
“Kugel was a firm believer that death was not always a bad thing - that life often reached such levels of crapitude that dying was preferable to living.”
“You never see a lion crucifyng another lion. You never see a bear just randomly murdering salmon for anything besides food; bears don't form armies, invade rivers, tear the heads off male salmon, rape the female salmon, and enslave their salmon children. It is finished, to Kugel, sounded a hell of a lot like Fuck all of you motherfuckers.”
“We are rational creatures, Professor Jove explained; hope is irrational. We thus set ourselves up for one dispiriting fall after the next. Anger and depression are not diseases or dysfunctions or anomalies; they are perfectly rational responses to the myriad avoidable disappointments that begin in a thoroughly irrational hope.”
“It couldn't be an all-bad world, could it, not with birds who warble and call? Maybe that was the secret - to find the few things that made life just a fraction better, and to focus on those. Bird warbles. Peach fuzz. Puppies barking as if they're full grown dogs. Nothing great, certainly nothing to justify the rest of it, but enough to keep you going.”
“Hiding from genocide inside a Jew's attic, thought Kugel, is like hiding from a lion inside a gazelle.”
“Vans are the vehicles of murderers. Serial Killers. Rapists. Thieves. Nothing good ever happens in a van. Police should be allowed to arrest van drivers without cause. The van is the cause, asshole.”
“The Kugels, Kugel hated to admit, might just have to, in the event of genocide, rely on the kindness of strangers. Mother used to say: I can name six million people who relied on the kindness of strangers.”
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Book Keywords:
sadnes, life, tragedy, life-and-living, hope, chickens, roads
