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The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson

Looking back, I realise it wasn’t only gym I dreaded at school. Every class was a torment. It wasn’t knowledge I objected to but instruction. Why couldn’t they just tell us what books to read and leave us to get on and read them?

School, Looking Back

Howard Jacobson

Shake any institution of higher learning, and a dozen boycotters will fall out of it.

Fall, Will, Higher

Howard Jacobson

Things go bad after a divorce and often stay that way. It is rare for the parties to return placidly to a time before they met. A bitterness lingers on. Those who call this our Independence Day, fantasising of returning to a never-never time before they married, when they were free, easy, single, and master of their fate, are delusional.

Time, Day, Easy

Howard Jacobson

There is a shop close to where I live, outside which, on certain nights of the month – I’ve no idea if the transit of the moon determines precisely when – fans of designer skateboards queue from early evening in order – well in order, I presume – to be among the first to jump on a skateboard when the shop opens in the morning.

Moon, Live, Evening

Howard Jacobson

For me a Writing Day was an occasion for self-reproach and panic, a time to lament the passing of the years, stare out of windows and remember that even those famous late starters Joseph Conrad and George Eliot had started by the age I was now.

Howard Jacobson

I wouldn’t dream of watching motor racing, cycling, or golf – which aren’t truly sports anyway.

Golf, Dream, Racing

Howard Jacobson

People often think that you have a sense of humor because you think that life is funny. Life isn’t funny at all. It’s appalling and tragic.

Funny, Life, People

Howard Jacobson

Economics is not a science; it is a quasi-religion: part superstition, part mystique, part sentimentality. Bankers dream like other men, the only difference being that when their dreams turn to nightmares, we all lose sleep. There can be no trusting the muttering of any prelate when it comes to money.

Money, Science, Sleep

Howard Jacobson

Trawl through the world of blogs and tweets, and you will find readers complaining when they stumble upon a word they don’t recognise, an attitude that doesn’t accord with their own, a passage of thought they find hard work, a joke they don’t get or of which they don’t approve.

Work, Hard Work, World

Howard Jacobson

So the mathematician and the artist are companioned in the same dark, and do obeisance to the same gods.

Howard Jacobson

An artist owed a duty to nothing except his own irresponsibility. It was OK for an artist to frolic in the water, no matter how bloody the waves or how high the tide rose. An ethicist had an obligation to drown.

Howard Jacobson

A life was owned by the person who lived it, he believed. What happened didn’t always happen because you wanted it to, but what you made of it was your responsibility.

life, responsibility