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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

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

Illusion Joy Life Loss
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
Charity you can give even when you haven’t got.
BERNARD MALAMUD

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

Clay Experience Past
One’s fantasy goes for a walk and returns with a bride.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Fantasy Funn Marriage Return
You see in others who you are.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Identity Who You Are
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
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
One often feels helpless in the face of the confusion of these times, such a mass of apparently uncontrollable events and experiences to live through, attempt to understand.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Apparteally Attempt Confusion Experience Time Uncontrolled
All my life I wanted to accomplish something worthwhile-a thing people will say took a little something.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Accomplishment Littles People
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
Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Pleasure Revision Writing
Nationality isn’t soul.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Nation Nationality Soul
You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Down Sitting Writing
(Clothes) cannot change a man’s nature. He’s either kind or he isn’t, with or without clothes.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Clothes Kind Men
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

We have two lives, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.

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We have two lives, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.

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Popular Authors

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