Isaac Bashevis Singer

Novelist

1902-11-21

Quotes by Isaac Bashevis Singer

• At moments when Herman fantasized about a new metaphysics, or even a new religion, he based everything on the attraction of the sexes. In the beginning was lust. The godly, as well as the human, principle is desire. Gravity, light, magnetism, thought may be aspects of the same universal longing. Suffering, emptiness, darkness are nothing more than interruptions of a cosmic orgasm that grows forever in intensity...

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• Where do the wheels of history lead? How can you be so sure that the wheels of history won't get bogged down in blood and marrow again?

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• Every human character appears only once in the history of human beings. And so does every event of love.

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• Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.

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• We have to believe in free-will. We've got no choice.

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• When a writer tries to explain too much, he's out of time before he begins.

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• When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.

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• Yes, I lay in my grave. But if you lie in a grave long enough, you get accustomed to it and you don't want to part from it. He had given me a pill of cyanide, He and his wife and their son also carried such pills. We all lived with death, and I want you to know that one can fall in love with death. Whoever has loved death cannot love anything else any more. When the liberation came and they told me to leave, I didn't want to go. I clung to the threshold like an ox being dragged to the slaughter. (Hanka)

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• Shoulders are from God, and burdens too.

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• Night is a time of rigor, but also of mercy. There are truths which one can see only when it's dark

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• If one knew the truth how could there be freedom? If hell and paradise were in the middle of the marketplace, everyone would be a saint.

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• I believe in God but people are liars. It's those people who say they are appointed by God who I don't believe in.

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• Kindness, I've discovered, is everything in life.

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• Yes, I lay in my grave. But if you lie in a grave long enough, you get accustomed to it and you don't want to part from it. He had given me a pill of cyanide, He and his wife and their son also carried such pills. We all lived with death, and I want you to know that one can fall in love with death. Whoever has loved death cannot love anything else any more. When the liberation came and they told me to leave, I didn't want to go. I clung to the threshold like an ox being dragged to the slaughter. (Hanka)

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• If one knew the truth how could there be freedom? If hell and paradise were in the middle of the marketplace, everyone would be a saint.

  Read quote

• When a writer tries to explain too much, he's out of time before he begins.

  Read quote

• Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.

  Read quote

• Where do the wheels of history lead? How can you be so sure that the wheels of history won't get bogged down in blood and marrow again?

  Read quote

• We have to believe in free-will. We've got no choice.

  Read quote

• Shoulders are from God, and burdens too.

  Read quote