Let him be floored, O Lord, thought Kugel. Let him be…

“Every Jew was the last Jew; Tevye the Terminal, every single one. Yet, Kugel couldn't help but observe, in all that time - no…

— Shalom Auslander

“I spent the best years of my life atoning for something I didn't do, something my parents didn't do, something done just about before…

— Shalom Auslander

“The Kugels, Kugel hated to admit, might just have to, in the event of genocide, rely on the kindness of strangers. Mother used to…

— Shalom Auslander

Vans are the vehicles of murderers. Serial Killers. Rapists. Thieves. Nothing good ever happens in a van. Police should be allowed to arrest van…

— Shalom Auslander

Roads are no place for naive chickens dreaming of nirvana.

— Shalom Auslander

“I kind of like it up here, Kugel said. It's got a certain fatalistic charm, a certain je ne sais fucked.”

— Shalom Auslander

“He could pull this off. He was sure of it. It would have been one thing to protect Anne Frank from the Nazis; he…

— Shalom Auslander

“He took the diary from Mother's hand and turned it over. The heartbreaking something, he read, of a tragic whatever.”

— Shalom Auslander

Write something dangerous. Say something you shouldn’t. Blow something up. But well.

— Shalom Auslander

His intelligence only exacerbated the guilt Kugel felt for bringing him into the world. It was one thing to have condemned a child to…

— Shalom Auslander

Kugel was a firm believer that death was not always a bad thing - that life often reached such levels of crapitude that dying…

— Shalom Auslander

“There is hurt in this world. There is pain. Hoping there won't be only makes it worse.”

— Shalom Auslander

“… It was the knowing that there had been a happier time, a place of joy and peace and security, that made the sudden…

— Shalom Auslander

...the greatest source of misery in the world, the greatest cause of anguish and hatred and sadness and death, was neither disease nor race…

— Shalom Auslander

“Remember your grandfather's last words, Jonah would tell his children: Life is nothing more than a little why.”

— Shalom Auslander