51 quotes
With a few grasping, kind words and a modern gimmick, she hoped to breathe eternity into a mortal matter, love.
The Little Disturbances of Man (1959)
I brought up lonesomeness again, and not being understood at all except by some women everybody hated.
The Little Disturbances of Man (1959)
Plot, the absolute line between two points which I've always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974)
For happiness, she also required work to do in this world and bread on the table.
Midrash on happiness (1990)
It is still hard to believe that a man who sends out the Ten Commandments every year for a Christmas card can be so easy buttoning and unbuttoning.
The Little Disturbances of Man (1959)
It’s hard to stand behind a people and culture in revolutionary transition when you are constantly worried about their irreplaceable and breakable artifacts.
Jack asked me, Isn't it a terrible thing to grow up in the shadow of another person's sorrow?
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974)
I sighed in and I groaned out, so as to melt a certain pain around my heart. A steel ring like arthritis, at my age.
The Little Disturbances of Man (1959)
Thank God for the head. The head is the only place you got to be young when the usual place gets used up.
I always say that racism is like pneumonia and anti-Semitism is like the common cold—everybody has it.
with The Paris Review (1992)
I thank you, Papa, for your kindness. It is true about me to this day. I am foolish but I am not a fool.
The Little Disturbances of Man (1959)
People like myself who must begin again and again in order to get anywhere at all.
Some Notes on Teaching (1970)
That was Janice, a political woman, conscious of power structure and power itself.
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974)
She remembered that he was a person who had killed.
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974)
But I do like this language -- wheat and chaff -- with its widening pool of foreign genes, and since I never have had any occasion to say “comestible,” it was pleasurable to think it.
I am ambitious, but it's a long-range thing with me. I have my confidential sights on a star, but there's half a lifetime to get to it. Meanwhile I keep my eyes open and am well dressed.
The Little Disturbances of Man (1959)
Don’t go through life without reading the autobiographies of Emma Goldman, Prince Kropotkin, Malcolm X
Some Notes on Teaching (1970)
I think that any life that’s interesting, lived, has a lot of pulls in it.
with Boston Review (1976)
Every day in our neighborhood there were whole apartments, beds, bureaus, kitchen tables out on the street. We understood that this was because of capitalism, which didn't care that working people had no work and no money for rent.
Injustice (1995)
When I came to think as a writer, it was because I had begun to live among women.
Of Poetry and Women and the World (1986)