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The Jewish People Have Been In Exile For 2,000 Years; They Have Lived In Hundreds Of Countries, Spoken Hundreds Of Languages And Still They Kept Their Old Language, Hebrew. They Kept Their Aramaic, Later Their Yiddish; They Kept Their Books; They Kept Their Faith.

-Isaac Bashevis Singer

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The Jewish People Have

Isaac Bashevis Singer

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The Jewish People Have Been In Exile For 2,000 Years; They Have Lived In Hundreds Of Countries, Spoken Hundreds Of Languages And Still They Kept Their Old Language, Hebrew. They Kept Their Aramaic, Later Their Yiddish; They Kept Their Books; They Kept Their Faith.

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What Nature Delivers To Us Is Never Stale. Because What Nature Creates Has Eternity In It.

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Men Want All Women To Lie Down As Whores And Get Up As Virgins.

Slaughter And Justice Cannot Dwell Together.

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I Know As A Writer How Valuable A Tool Is The Wastebasket. Perhaps God Throws Away Many Experiments Before He Finds The Right Expression. Perhaps We Are The Discards - Or We Could Be The Part He Keeps. This Mystery Is What Keeps Us All Going, To See What Happens In The Next Chapter.

God Gave Us So Many Emotions, And So Many Strong Ones. Every Human Being, Even If He Is An Idiot, Is A Millionaire In Emotions.

There Are 500 Reasons I Write For Children.... Children Read Books, Not Reviews. They Don't Give A Hoot About The Critics.... They Don't Read To Free Themselves Of Guilt, To Quench Their Thirst For Rebellion, Or To Get Rid Of Alienation. They Still Believe In God, The Family, Angels, Devils, Witches, Goblins, Logic, Clarity, Punctuation, And Other Such Obsolete Stuff.... They Don't Expect Their Beloved Writer To Redeem Humanity. Young As They Are, They Know That It Is Not In His Power. Only The Adults Have Such Childish Illusions.

People Often Say That Humans Have Always Eaten Animals, As If This Is A Justification For Continuing The Practice. According To This Logic, We Should Not Try To Prevent People From Murdering Other People, Since This Has Also Been Done Since The Earliest Of Times.

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Two Important Things Are To Have A Genuine Interest In People And To Be Kind To Them. Kindness, I've Discovered, Is Everything.

The Genuine Writer Cannot Ignore The Fact That The Family Is Losing Its Spiritual Foundation.

Our Knowledge Is A Little Island In A Great Ocean Of Nonknowledge.

We Know What A Person Thinks Not When He Tells Us What He Thinks, But By His Actions.

God Is A Writer And We Are Both The Heroes And The Readers.

Writing Has Power, But Its Power Has No Vector. Writers Can Stir The Mind, But They Can't Direct It. Time Changes Things, God Changes Things, The Dictators Change Things, But Writers Can't Change Anything.

No Lepidopterist's Collection In The Entire World...full If Iridescent Wings, Is Worth The Life Of A Single Butterfly.

It Is Written, Better To Be A Fool All Your Days Than For One Hour To Be Evil. You Are Not A Fool. They Are The Fools. For He Who Causes His Neighbor To Feel Shame Loses Paradise Himself.

Of Course I Believe In Free Will. Do We Have A Choice?

When A Day Passes, It Is No Longer There. What Remains Of It? Nothing More Than A Story. If Stories Weren't Told Or Books Weren't Written, Man Would Live Like The Beasts, Only For The Day.

It Is A Fact That The Classics Of Yiddish Literature Are Also The Classics Of The Modern Hebrew Literature.

When I Was A Little Boy, They Called Me A Liar, But Now That I Am Grown Up, They Call Me A Writer.

All Is Foreseen But The Choice Is Given.

Every Body Resisted (the Slaughterer) In Its Own Fashion, Tried To Escape And Seemed To Argue With The Creator To Its Last Breath.

Man Prays For Mercy, But Is Unwilling To Extend It To Others. Why Then Should Man Expect Mercy From God? It Is Unfair To Expect Something That You Are Not Willing To Give.

But My Gloom Did Not Lessen. I Knew That I'd Had A Bad Dream, And I Stood In The Dark Trying To Recollect It. The Second I Closed My Eyes, I Was With The Dead. They Did Things Words Cannot Express. They Spoke Madness. ("hanka")

Even In The Worm That Crawls In The Earth There Glows A Divine Spark. When You Slaughter A Creature, You Slaughter God.

Shoulders Are From God And Burdens Too.

Originality Is Not Seen In Single Words Or Even In Sentences. Originality Is The Sum Total Of A Man's Thinking Or His Writing.

The Waste Basket Is The Writer's Best Friend.

In Our Time, When The Literature For Adults Is Deteriorating, Good Books For Children Are The Only Hope, The Only Refuge.

In The History Of Old Jewish Literature There Was Never Any Basic Difference Between The Poet And The Prophet. Our Ancient Poetry Often Became Law And A Way Of Life.

We Must Believe In Free Will - We Have No Choice.

There Is A Permanent Amnesia Planted In Us, Which Just As We Keep Forgetting Our Dreams, We Sometimes Keep On Forgetting Our Reality.

A Story To Me Means A Plot Where There Is Some Surprise... Because This Is How Life Is Full Of Surprises.

What's The Good Of Not Believing? Today It's Your Wife You Don't Believe; Tomorrow It's God Himself You Won't Take Stock In.

While The Poet Entertains He Continues To Search For Eternal Truths, For The Essence Of Being. In His Own Fashion He Tries To Solve The Riddle Of Time And Change, To Find An Answer To Suffering, To Reveal Love In The Very Abyss Of Cruelty And Injustice. Strange As These Words May Sound I Often Play With The Idea That When All The Social Theories Collapse And Wars And Revolutions Leave Humanity In Utter Gloom, The Poet--whom Plato Banned From His Republic--may Rise Up To Save Us All.

As Often As Herman Had Witnessed The Slaughter Of Animals And Fish, He Always Had The Same Thought: In Their Behavior Toward Creatures, All Men Were Nazis.

Kindness, I've Discovered, Is Everything In Life.

Sometimes You Have The Feeling That Some Little Imp Is Standing Behind You And Dictating To You, But He Gives It To You Slowly, Drop By Drop.

Heaven And Earth Conspire That Everything Which Has Been, Be Rooted And Reduced To Dust. Only The Dreamers, Who Dream While Awake, Call Back The Shadows Of The Past And Braid Nets From The Unspun Thread.

Man Is A Disgusting Thing. If You Beat Him He Starts To Scream, But If It Is The Other One Who Is Beaten, Then He Constructs A Theory.

The Pessimism Of The Creative Person Is Not Decadence But A Mighty Passion For The Redemption Of Man.

We Write Not Only For Children But Also For Their Parents. They, Too, Are Serious Children.

What A Strange Power There Is In Clothing.

The New England Conscience Doesn't Keep You From Doing What You Shouldn't - It Just Keeps You From Enjoying It.

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