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You could not pity anything if you weren’t a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention.

Bernard Malamud

You could not pity anything if you weren’t a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Men Pity Surprise
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

Insects Loneliness Lonely Matter Men Stars
We can’t all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Human Relations Stranger World
I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Knowledge Littles Sometime
Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Happiness Plus Space
If your train’s on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Stations Track Train
No use fanning up hot coals when you have to walk across them.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Across Anger Coal Hot
The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Freedom Others Purpose
Some men are by nature explorers; my nature is to stay under the same moon and stars, and if the weather is wet, under the same roof. It’s a strange world, why make it stranger?
BERNARD MALAMUD

Adventure Moon Stars
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

Down Forever Hurt Obstacles Overnight
I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Confusion Giving Order
Ithink Isaid’All menare Jews excepttheydon’t know it.’I doubt I expected anyone to take the statement literally. But I think it’s an understandable statement and a metaphoric way of indicating how history, sooner or later, treats all men.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Doubt Men Metaphoric Statement Thinking
The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Ideas Moving Writing
Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Pleasure Revision Writing
We didn’t starve but nobody ate chicken unless we were sick or the chicken was.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Poor Poverty Sick
… it’s possible to let love fly by like a cloud in a windy sky if one is too timid, or perhaps unable to believe he is entitled to good fortune.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Believe Cloud Sky

You could not pity anything if you weren’t a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention.

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You could not pity anything if you weren’t a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention.

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Popular Authors

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