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

Bernard Malamud

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

Blame Giving Misery
All men are Jews, though few men know it.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Jew Knows Men
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
Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Sadness Tragedy Wine
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
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
You see in others who you are.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Identity Who You Are
It was all those biographies in me yelling, ‘We want out. We want to tell you what we’ve done to you.’
BERNARD MALAMUD

Biography Done Want Yelling
Tomorrow the world is not the same as today, though God listens with the same ear.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Change Ears World
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
First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Draft Firsts Learn Stories
Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Boring Live Mode Writing
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
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
The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course
BERNARD MALAMUD

Course Normal Steps
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

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

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

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