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.

Roads are no place for naive chickens dreaming of nirvana.

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.

...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.

My point is that death is more tragic than life, than any life, because every life has hope of some kind.

Written with passion, honesty, humor, and a stubborn, rebellious optimism, Dear Marcus is like nothing I've ever read. When a bullet in the back told Jerry McGill not to go on, Jerry went on-smiling.

Expecting hell, we're ill prepared for heaven.

Sages tell us that the Torah tells us that until the age of thirteen, all of boy's sins are ascribed to his father.

So desperate was Kugel for things to turn out for the best, proclaimed Professor Jove, that he couldn't stop worrying about the worst. Hope, said Professor Jove, was Solomon Kugel's greatest failing.

Are you coming back to campus or you sticking around here with the prick?

Prayer is a path where there is none.

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

To misstate, or even merely understate, the relation of the universities to beauty is one kind of error that can be made. A university is among the precious things that can be destroyed.

Friendship is also a kind of medicine, and the markets for it, too, are sometimes black.

Give me back the $800 billion for the Iraq war and children's television PBS is on the house.

I read books more than I go out.

Arnaud Desplechin invented me as an actor. I never imagined Id be acting in movies.

The vegetarian movement is an ancient movement and is not quite a modern one.

A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope.