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Immigrant life in general is miserable, as one sees in the literature produced by those who experienced the journey.

— Ilan Stavans

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Source: Ilan Stavans Introduction to Yiddish South of the Border: An Anthology of Latin American Yiddish Writing edited by Alan Astro (2003)
Source quality: Source identified Names the work or year, but without an exact location.

More by Ilan Stavans

Without the classics, we are a tabula rasa: we have no memory. We not only open the classics to re-create the past; we also use them to calibrate the present.

Interview (2021)

What I look for in the classics is a message that is reinvented every time a new reader opens it. Along with the author, it is the role of the introducer and artist to make a case for that fresh take.

Interview (2021)

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Topics

Books

More quotes by Ilan Stavans

A life in two languages is a life experienced twice.

Because you live in two or three worlds doesn't mean you don't live in any of them.

Interview (1999)

Reading a classic, I believe, ought to entail an element of foreignness...Classics are windows into an epoch, not only in content but in form.

Interview (2021)

Isn’t that the dream of democracy, to allow its dwellers to have a voice? The only way to achieve that is to allow them to appreciate the voices of the past.

Interview (2021)

I don't think Latinos are a separate nation in the U.S. 'We are entering, belonging and sharing that melting pot with many other minority groups.

Interview (1999)

All Ilan Stavans quotes →

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Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Francis Bacon Meditationes sacræ (1597)

It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge.

Albert Pike Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871)

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Logan Pearsall Smith Afterthoughts (1931)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Ilan Stavans (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.