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Bernard Malamud Quotes (displaying: 1 - 30 of 31 quotes)

Theme:
Life is a tragedy full of joy.
Bernard Malamud
What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
Bernard Malamud
Theme:
Where to look if you've lost your mind?
Bernard Malamud
Theme:
She is not for you. She is a wild one--wild, without shame. This is not a bride for a rabbi".
Bernard Malamud
Theme:
The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
Bernard Malamud
Theme:
There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to go - if there are no doors or windows he walks through a wall.
Bernard Malamud
Theme:
We have two lives the one we learn with and the life we live after that.
Bernard Malamud
Theme:
A meshummed gives up one God for another. I don't want either. We live in a world where the clock ticks fast while he's on his timeless mountain staring in space. He doesn't see us and he doesn't care. Today I want my piece of bread, not in Paradise.
Bernard Malamud
Theme:
You could not pity anything if you weren't a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention.
Bernard Malamud
Of course it would cost something, but he was an expert in cutting corners; and when there were no more corners left he would make circles rounder.
Bernard Malamud
Theme:
But she had recently come to think that in such unhappy times--when the odds were so high against personal happiness--to find love was miraculous, and to fulfill it as best two people could was what really mattered.
Bernard Malamud
Theme:
Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.
Bernard Malamud
Theme:
The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course
Bernard Malamud
If you ever forget you're a Jew, a Gentile will remind you.
Bernard Malamud
Theme:
Without heroes we're all plain people and don't know how far we can go.
Bernard Malamud
Theme:
Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.
Bernard Malamud
Theme:
She had recently come to think that in such unhappy times-when the odds were so high against personal happiness-to find love was miraculous, and to fulfill it as best as two people could was what really mattered. Was it more important to insist a man's religious beliefs be exactly hers, or that the two of them have in common ideals, a desire to keep love in their lives, and to preserve in every possible way what was best in themselves? The less difference among people, the better; thus she settled it for herself yet was dissatisfied for those for whom she hadn't settled it,
Bernard Malamud
Theme:
Life, despite their frantic yoohooings, had passed them by.
Bernard Malamud
Theme:
A man is an island in the only sense that matters, not an easy way to be. We live in mystery, a cosmos of separate lonely bodies, men, insects, stars. It is all loneliness and men know it best.
Bernard Malamud
Theme:
She waited uneasily and shyly. From afar he saw that her eyes--clearly her father's--were filled with desperate innocence. He pictured, in her, his own redemption. Violins and lit candles revolved in the sky. Leo ran forward with flowers out-thrust.
Bernard Malamud
Nobody lived in Eden anymore.
Bernard Malamud
Theme:
Without heroes, we are all plain people and don't know how far we can go.
Bernard Malamud
Theme:
First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge & enhance an idea, to reform it . . . Revision is one of the true pleasures of writing.
Bernard Malamud
Theme:
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself."(Interview, New York Post Magazine, September 14, 1958)
Bernard Malamud
Theme:
Leo hurried up to bed and hid under the covers. Under the covers he thought his life through. Although he soon fell asleep he could not sleep her out of his mind. He woke, beating his breast. Though he prayed to be rid of her, his prayers went unanswered. Through days of torment he endlessly struggled not to love her; fearing success, he escaped it. He then concluded to convert her to goodness, himself to God. The idea alternately nauseated and exalted him.
Bernard Malamud
Theme:
Overnight business could go down enough to hurt; yet as a rule it slowly recovered--sometimes it seemed to take forever--went up, not high enough to be really up, only not down.
Bernard Malamud
Theme:
I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.
Bernard Malamud
Theme:
Wonderboy flashed in the sun. It caught the sphere it was biggest. A noise like a twenty-one gun salute cracked the sky. There was a straining, ripping sound and a few drops of rain spattered to the ground somebody then shouted it was raining cats and dogs. By the time of Roy got in from second he was wading in water ankle deep.
Bernard Malamud
Theme:
A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.
Bernard Malamud
Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
Bernard Malamud