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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

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

Stations Track Train
How can we be strangers if we both believe in God?
BERNARD MALAMUD

Believe Both God Stranger
To any writer: Teach yourself to work in uncertainty. Many writers are anxious when they begin, or try something new.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Character Discipline Writing
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
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
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
Reader, I am myself the subject of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and so vain a matter.
BERNARD MALAMUD

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

Blame Giving Misery
The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Freedom Others Purpose
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
I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Afterthought Flower Language
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
Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Who You Are 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 don’t think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.
BERNARD MALAMUD

Give Up Giving Thinking

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Bernard Malamud Quotes