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Children were strangers you loved because you could love. If they gave back love when they were grown you were ahead of the game.

Bernard Malamud

The past exudes legend: one can’t make pure clay of time’s mud.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Clay Experience Past
No use fanning up hot coals when you have to walk across them.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Across Anger Coal Hot
We’re persecuted in the most civilized languages.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Civilized Language Persecuted
Without heroes, we are all plain people and don’t know how far we can go.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Courage Inspirational Inspiring
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
We didn’t starve but nobody ate chicken unless we were sick or the chicken was.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Poor Poverty Sick
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

Circles Cutting Experts
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
It’s one thing for a man not to know, not to have learned; it’s another not to be able to live by what one does know.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Diversity Justice Know Learn Men
The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Baseball Mythology Quality
How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Assuming Discipline Matter Works
What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Suffering Taught Uselessness
Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Illusion Joy Life Loss
The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
BERNARD MALAMUD

Pages Self Stories
Life is a tragedy full of joy.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Follow Joy Life Your Heart
The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Freedom Others Purpose
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
Where to look if you’ve lost your mind?
BERNARD MALAMUD

Looks Lost Mind
If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Cracks Eventually Mystery Real Track
As long as a man stays alive he can’t tell what chances will pop up next. But a dead man signs no checks.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Long Men Perseverance
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
Charity you can give even when you haven’t got.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Charity Giving Havens
If your train’s on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Stations Track Train
… 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
I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Afterthought Flower Language
You can’t eat language but it eases thirst.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Ease Language Thirst
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

Men Tattoo Walk Wall Window

Children were strangers you loved because you could love. If they gave back love when they were grown you were ahead of the game.

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Children were strangers you loved because you could love. If they gave back love when they were grown you were ahead of the game.

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Popular Authors

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