Nathan Englander Quotes

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to escape.

A bad dream.To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.A bad dream.I remembered everything.I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig-tree and Marco's diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon's wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a grey skull.Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them.But they were part of me. They were my landscape

I really wanted to die at certain periods in my life.

Nothing good comes out of depression.

Sickness, insanity and death were the angels that surrounded my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life.

I might look successful and happy being in front of you today, but I once suffered from severe depression and was in total despair.

I truly, truly suffered depression, to the deep core.

non-reality was black, and it didn't hurt so much.

Take me away from all this Death.

Wish you could turn off the questions, turn off the voices, turn off all sound. Yearn to close out the ugliness, close out the filthiness, close out all light. Long to cast away yesterday, cast away memory, cast away all jeapordy. Pray you could somehow stop uncertainty, somehow stop the loathing, somehow stop the pain. Act on your impulse, swallow the bottle, cut a little deeper, put the gun to your chest.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

I drag myself out of nightmares each morning and find there's no relief in waking.

Here is The Boy with the Thorn in His Side, dying in your world. A man made monster with every human emotion, overdosed on worthlessness in a world that could never wrap it’s head around him (so don’t even try). When it’s all over just remember every single word you ever said was always just a bullet to his head. Bury him underground between friends and love - the only things that are gonna make it to the end with him. Look for his body buried beneath where the yellow weeds are growing and know he’s still living in his nightmares.

I'm suddenly finding it hard to know the difference between nightmares and consciousness.

I don't smile much, and I never laugh. If you'd been through what I've been through, you wouldn't be smiling, either.

He did not know what love was. And he did not know what good it was. But he knew he carried it around with him, a scabrous spot of rot, of contagion, for which there was no cure.

Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.

Suicide doesn't solve your problems. It only makes them infinitely, un-countably worse.

Despair often breeds disease.

You know that thing when you're not asleep but you're not awake, and you can't move your body? I had that kind of nightmare, and I felt like all my teeth were crumbling in my mouth. Now I have this fear of all my teeth being knocked out of my mouth somehow!

I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life.

Disease, insanity, and death were the angels that attended my cradle, and since then have followed me throughout my life.

Life is absolutely horrific, leading up to absolute horror.

History... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

When my son was murdered, people asked me how I felt about God and what had happened to my son. I said, 'No, you can't go there. You have to understand that there is a devil, and he works 24/7. Whoever murdered our son was with the devil.'