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We didn’t starve but nobody ate chicken unless we were sick or the chicken was.

Bernard Malamud

The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Baseball Mythology Quality
For misery don’t blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Blame Giving Misery
I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Afterthought Flower Language
Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Ideas Reform Revision Work Writing
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
And if at all possible, give order to; but one must not withdraw from the task if he has some small things to offer – he does so at the risk of diminishing his humanity.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Diminishing Humanity Small Some Withdraw
I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Metaphor Sometimes Two
The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Freedom Others Purpose
If you ever forget you are a Jew a goy will remind you.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Few Forget Jokes Remind
Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Boring Live Mode Writing
We have two lives, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Life Live Suffering Two
There is in the darkness a unity, if you will, that cannot be achieved in any other environment, a blending of self with what the self perceives, and exquisite mystical experience.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Dark Experiences Mystical Self
You see in others who you are.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Identity Who You Are
In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Ate Dream Success
A man had to learn, it was his nature.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Learning Men Nature
The past exudes legend: one can’t make pure clay of time’s mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was.Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Clay Past Recapture Time

We didn’t starve but nobody ate chicken unless we were sick or the chicken was.

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We didn’t starve but nobody ate chicken unless we were sick or the chicken was.

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