Top 35 Howard Jacobson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Marriage is like a barbecue. When you light a barbecue, it’s very exciting to see the flames. That’s lovely, but you have to wait until the flames have died down. Everything that you want from a barbecue happens on the hot embers. You can’t cook on those flames.”

— Howard Jacobson

2. “The girls pick snouts from the pack as though they’re chocolates and it matters which they select.”

— Howard Jacobson

3. “But what is the imagination for if not tto grasp how the world feels to those who don’t think what you think?”

— Howard Jacobson

4. “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?”

— Howard Jacobson

5. “In the matrimonial life of the Jewish male every day is Yom Kippur.”

— Howard Jacobson

6. “But aunties are equivocal figures of affection, wicked and unreliable, pretending love only so long as they are short of love themselves, and then off.”

— Howard Jacobson

7. “Aren’t all dreads half desires?”

— Howard Jacobson

8. “There is no word for the sound a life makes.”

— Howard Jacobson

9. “I took the route favoured by all worldly failures and became a spiritual success.”

— Howard Jacobson

10. “At any age there is future one doesn’t have. Never enough life when you are happy, that was the thing. Never so much bliss that you can’t take a little more.”

— Howard Jacobson

11. “T. S. Eliot told Auden tht the reason he played patience night after night was that it was the nearest thing to being dead.”

— Howard Jacobson

12. “History’s lesson is that bullies ultimately defeat themselves.”

— Howard Jacobson

13. “Is that what lives on longest, the sadness? The proof of our being weak, not the proof of our being strong?”

— Howard Jacobson

14. “And thinking of her waiting to be found, while he was waiting to find, gave a beautiful symmetry to the love he felt for her.”

— Howard Jacobson

15. “That was what was cruel about superficial change: it exposed what could never change.”

— Howard Jacobson

16. “Jew-hating was back-of course Jew-hating was back. Soon it would be full-blown Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism. These things didn’t go away. There was nowhere for them to go. They where indestructible, non-biodegradable. They waited in the great rubbish tip that was the human heart.”

— Howard Jacobson

17. “What it is to see, what liberties are taken when one looks, where looking leaves one vis-a-vis one’s subject, or how far looking ultimately becomes one’s subject – these are important questions.”

— Howard Jacobson

18. “I could use the company but I can’t go through the pain of getting it.”

— Howard Jacobson

19. “On account of their innate aggressiveness, songs of that sort were no longer played on the console. Not banned – nothing was banned exactly – simply not played. Encouraged to fall into desuetude, like the word desuetude.”

— Howard Jacobson

20. “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.”

— Howard Jacobson

21. “It’s never over till it’s over with a friend.”

— Howard Jacobson

22. “Because art, for all its adventuresomeness, is also capable of being the most recidivist of human activities, forever falling back in reaction to what was itself a reaction to something else.”

— Howard Jacobson

23. “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.”

— Howard Jacobson

24. “A novelist should make you realize nothing is stable. If you don’t believe anything with robustness, you’re doing something more radical than anything else.”

— Howard Jacobson

25. “I’m a Jewish Jane Austen.”

— Howard Jacobson

26. “That was what living a serious life meant, wasn’t it, honoring the gravity of things by not pretending they were light?”

— Howard Jacobson

27. “Don’t I look after you when you’re ill?’ ‘You do. You’re marvellous to me when I’m ill. It’s when I’m well that you’re no use.”

— Howard Jacobson

28. “Was it better then – measuring the loss – not to know happiness at all? Better to go through life waiting for what never came, because that way you had less to mourn?”

— Howard Jacobson

29. “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.”

— Howard Jacobson

30. “You can’t have a church town without belief and you can’t have belief without intolerance.”

— Howard Jacobson

31. “He would come to school balancing his night’s dreams like an acrobat bearing a human pyramid on his shoulders.”

— Howard Jacobson

32. “Whoever spoke of a wise lover? The wiser the lover, the longer ago he stopped loving.”

— Howard Jacobson

33. “But you don’t always have to ask to know.”

— Howard Jacobson

34. “He let himself be storm-tossed, riding her billowing sea. When she held him like this he could see nothing, but the colour of his blindness was the colour of waves breaking.”

— Howard Jacobson

35. “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

36. “That’s how vilification works. The victim ingests the views of his tormentor. If that’s how I look, that’s what I must be.”

— Howard Jacobson

37. “Faith wasn’t a mystery to him; the mystery to him was holding on to faith. He.”

— Howard Jacobson

38. “Just when you’ve overcome the grief, you realise you are left with the loneliness.”

— Howard Jacobson

39. “Henry believes he knows exactly when the ninety-four-year-old woman in the neighbouring apartment dies. He hears her turn off. Until now he has not been able to distinguish her from her appliances – her washing machine, her vacuum cleaner, her radiators, her television. But the moment she gives up the ghost he detects the cessation of a noise of which he was not previously aware. A hum, was it? A whirr? Impossible to say. There is no word for the sound a life makes.”

— Howard Jacobson