Jews From The United States

"All my writing life I have written to please first myself. Never, except wartime, have I written to order on a theme or subject definitely requested or suggested. But war, to me, is not life at all. It is an excrescence, a cancer on the body of civilization."

"It is difficult to write a really good short story because it must be a complete and finished reflection of life with only a few words to use as tools. There isn't time for bad writing in a short story. In a novel one can be dull for pages and still get away with it. It is, to me, an interesting and baffling fact that today, more than thirty years after The Homely Heroine was written, it still is as difficult for me to write a short story (or anything, for that matter) as it was when first I began. A single short story may take a month, six weeks, two months to write. Usually, the easier they are to read the harder they are to write. Often a short story theme may take a year of conscious and subconscious thinking before it is ripe for writing. Sometimes a possible short story seems too tough to be worth the fight. But it stays around, taunting you, daring you to come on, and finally you write it to be rid of it...In some cases the reader may feel, after reading a short story, approximately the sensation he has experienced after having too hastily eaten a heavy meal. He has treated a dinner as a snack and his digestion rebels."

"Early in my short-story career I hit upon the character of a traveling saleswoman named Mrs. Emma McChesney. I never had met or seen a traveling saleswoman and I don't know why I named her Emma McChesney, but she became enormously popular and very nearly turned out to be my undoing. The first story, entitled Representing T. A. Buck, was published in the American Magazine in 1911. I hadn't meant to write a series, but at the urging of the editors I tried a second, called Roast Beef Medium. Well, that did it. The American businesswoman, inexplicably enough, had not been presented in fiction. This now seems incredible, but it was so. The magazine-reading public took Emma to its heart...Emma was hearty, salty, good as gold (better), and oh, so courageous. She was fine in her day, but this is not it; she is as dated as the Featherloom Petticoats she sold..."

"This is certain: I never have written a line except to please myself. I never have written with an eye to what is called the public or the market or the trend or the editor or the reviewer. Good or bad, popular or unpopular, lasting or ephemeral, the words I have put down on paper were the best words I could summon at the time to express the thing I wanted more than anything else to say."

"The writer given to rereading his or her past work is a writer in danger. Once you begin to mumble among your souvenirs you're through. Any writer who is properly a writer is working as long as he is alive or awake. It is virtually impossible for a writer to ride in the subway or on a bus, walk on the street or down a country road, telephone, read a book, talk, listen, breathe, without consciously or unconsciously sustaining the act of writing, in his mind at least. The analytical creative mind goes click-click-click while it is awake-and sometimes while it is asleep. It makes the writer's life interesting but somewhat feverish. Frequently one wishes it were possible to turn off the machinery that is eternally registering, collecting, discarding, filing. Writers are a tired lot, for the most part; and no wonder. It would be pleasant to know that these stories, some born long ago, others still young, have the strength and vitality to make new friends and even to renew old friendships. The writer herself is fond of them, or they would not be here. But the feeling is much that of a parent whose sons and daughters have married and gone off into the world. There they are, on their own at last, sink or swim, live or die. The author is finished with them, everything she can do for them has been done. And a new infant, not yet strong enough to walk alone, waits to be shown a way of life."

"I am not so naïve as to be oblivious of evil and ugliness, but I thought that the bulk of the human race wanted, deep down, to be good if only they could, somehow. A childish belief, perhaps. But I shrink from relinquishing it. I am not astonished at brutality, nor at the weak yielding to it. I know that man belongs to the animal kingdom. But I know, too, that he is superior to other animals through the possession of that intangible something called the spirit. Just as I believe that God is Good and that Good is God, so I believe that Good (and therefore God) lives within each of us. Each one of us is not only an animal, but a spirit. And for that reason alone (though there are a thousand others) I marvel that every decent human being does not reject the spiritual murder which accompanies the scourge of Fascism, Nazism and Communism. Of the three, the Nazi plan will perish first, not because of the Nazi brutality, but because of the Nazi vulgarity and insolence. As in 1914 (and always) the German nation now reckons mathematically without considering the human equation. A mistake."

"The persecution, torture, and death of six million European Jews had actually brought little or no protest from a Christian world whose religion was based on the teachings of a Jew."

"During World War I and World War II, I wrote few short stories. I wrote, in fact, little of anything other than propaganda, and for ordered propaganda writing I have scant ability. Thousands of fictional so-called war stories were written. Few possessed the slightest value. The best, in my opinion, were those published in The New Yorker during World War II. Some of these were brilliant, courageous, and carried a terrific impact."

"You have a sense of humor, Mr. Kazam. That’s a rare thing in the religious."

"It was then that I drifted into the nut cult business. I found out that all you need for capital is a stock of capitalized abstract qualities, like All-Knowingness, Will-Mind-Urge, Planetude and Exciliation. With that to work on I can make my living almost anywhere on the globe."

"“He began with the complicated salute of the Astral Confederation and got down to business. ‘Brother Kazam,’ he said, ‘I wish to show you an ancient sacred book I have just discovered.’ I laughed, of course. By that time I’d already discovered seven ancient books by myself, all ready-translated into the language of the country I would be working at the time. The ‘Isba Kazhlunk’ was the most successful; that’s the one I found preserved in the hide of a mammoth in a Siberian glacier.”"

"Greed advise with hate; greed wins; greed always wins."

"They were immigrants into the sea; like all immigrants they longed for the Old Country. Then the second generation. Like all second generations they had no patience with the old people or their tales. This was real, this sea, this gale, this rope! Then the third generation. Like all third generations it felt a sudden desperate hollowness and lack of identity. What was real? Who are we? What is NEMET which we have lost? But by then grandfather and grandmother could only mumble vaguely; the cultural heritage was gone, squandered in three generations, spent forever. As always, the fourth generation did not care."

"Of course, I shouldn’t be telling you state secrets, but I've noticed at home that a state secret is something known to everybody who makes more than fifty thousand a year and to nobody who makes less."

"God help the human race if you thugs are its fighters for liberty."

"This week, the former President, hoping to shift the imagery away from his imminent fingerprinting-and-mugshot session in Georgia, has declared it beneath his dignity to engage in a debate with his rivals in the race for the Republican nomination. Instead, he will subject himself to the feathery inquisition of Tucker Carlson on social media. Yet Trump, the unwise wise guy, will eventually face less kindly examiners. Although he has long enjoyed the sleazy glamour and cynical counsel supplied by mob-adjacent figures like Roy Cohn, his mentor in matters of conscience and the law, Trump has no code and shows no loyalty. Despite his mobster cosplay, in short, he lacks even a gangster’s sense of dignity. Carmine (the Snake) Persico, for all his many sins, would have found Trump unworthy of the |Cosa Nostra. Before the mafia's disintegration, a boss was obliged to help a fallen or legally entangled soldier. And yet Trump won’t even pay the legal bills of [[Rudy Giuliani|[Rudy] Giuliani]], his loyal sidekick. The most lasting image of Giuliani will not be of a valiant public servant inspiring a grieving city but of a cynical mook lying about stolen votes on Trump's behalf while rivulets of hair dye course down his cheek."

"These scientists, once young and eager, had become gnomes grappling hopelessly with problems far beyond their reach."

"[M]y father was an architect. He and my mother separated when I was young, but before that I went with them to Russia, where he had an assignment; then World War I broke out, and he was arrested and sent to Siberia. My mother and I had a terrible journey back, on an ice-cold train, first to Paris, eventually home."

"I used to go skating regularly in Berlin. One day, I went to the skating rink and found I was there on the wrong day; instead of skating, they had a show. I thought I might as well stay, so I put my skates over my shoulders and went in. The show starred Sam Wooding accompanying the Chocolate Kiddies Revue; he had a 8- or 10-piece band, and I was totally fascinated."

"Implicit in the devotion to purifying enzymes, is the faith of a dedicated biochemist of being able to reconstitute in a test tube anything a cell can do."

"The ship took a long way around, via the Caribbean. A West Indian cricket player befriended me, and I began to sit at his table. From that point on, I noticed that the white passengers began treating me very strangely. Finally, one of them said: "We don't do that you know. Don't socialize with those people." That was my first encounter with segregation."

"I didn’t care about overtime. I didn’t care about how much money it cost me. I wanted to get the thing right. So I never rushed musiciansinto the studio and rushed them out. When we went into overtime,which was double for everybody and triple for the leader—forget all this, lets [sic] make the records, right? The musicians didn't just do it for the money. They wanted it right too. They listened to the playbacks and they'd say if something wasn't quite right, and go back and do it again."

"Alice Hoffman takes seemingly ordinary lives and lets us see and feel extraordinary things."

"you will find elements of magic realism in literature from all over the world—not just in Latin America. You will find it in Scandinavian sagas, in African poetry, in Indian literature written in English, in American literature written by ethnic minorities. Writers like Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver, and Alice Hoffman all use this style."

"My favorite writer is Alice Hoffman; she’s brilliant."

"I start writing a novel with a question I need answered. Practical Magic addresses serious questions about the place of women in our society-questions that are as important, or more so, than they were twenty-five years ago. Unfortunately, over the past quarter century, the place of a woman in society has not moved forward as we had wished, then and now. There are still many of the same issues left to address: equal pay, childcare, healthcare, sexual assault. Magic may not be able to right these wrongs, but sisterhood just might. The years have only intensified the importance of telling women's stories, and doing our best to ensure that women who have been forced to be silent can speak and tell their own truths."

"I believed anything can happen. It was a huge escape for me as reader. I loved anything that could remove me from reality and make me see possibilities. Fiction in general gives you the freedom of exploring the truth without boundaries, to get to a deeper truth, and fairy tales have always been my model."

"I loved magic from the start, beginning with the stories my Russian grandmother told me. If "magic" was in the title of a book, I was bound to find it. In the world of fairy tales, the amazing is recounted in a matter-of fact tone, with the practical and the magical living side by side. One day there is a knock at the door, or a rose that blooms through the winter, or a spindle that must be avoided at all costs. It was the melding of the magical and the everyday that was most affecting to me as a reader, for the world I lived in seemed much the same. People you loved could disappear, through death or divorce; they could turn into heroes or beasts. My personal experience and my childhood reading left me longing for a world in which anything could happen, magic or not, on an ordinary day."

"The family dynamics are complex; and as often happens in our own lives, how we view the people close to us, even when they are fictional characters, depends on where we stand in the world at that time."

"Witches are outsiders, and those among us who have been bullied and ostracized can relate to their plight. Part of our fascination with witches is that they are the only female mythic figures with power. These are women who don't need to be rescued by a prince or a king but, instead, can save"

"I've always tried to go directly from sleep to the computer, before I have the time to start censoring myself. I like to get up at 5:00. I do my best work early in the morning before the world's awake. For the kind of fiction I write, which is emotional fiction, you have to let go. Let the walls down, the defenses down. Don't worry about what people are going to think."

"The lonelier you are, the more you pull away, until humans seem an alien race, with customs and a language you can't begin to understand. (p145)"

"I never even believed in happiness. I didn't think it existed. Now look at me. I'm ready to believe in just about anything." (p161)"

"That was how evil spoke. It made its own corrupt sense; it swore that the good were evil, and that evil had come to save mankind. It brought up ancient fears and scattered them on the street like pearls. To fight what was wicked, magic and faith were needed. This was what one must turn to when there was no other option."

"If you are loved, you never lose the person who loved you. You carry them with you all your life."

"He wondered why it was only when you were at the end of your life that it was possible to view it with honesty and truth."

"You are the man I admired most of all, Julien would say to him if he could, if they were lying side by side watching the universe expand all around them. (p283)"

"'Because of this what transpired between them was something they hadn't expected, it was almost as if they had fallen in love in a world where anything could happen and nothing was impossible. (p295)"

"the Germans had researched her family; they were very thorough after all, and they knew things about her grandfather that she herself didn't know. She would think of this in the camp they took her to after she was arrested, how little she knew about the person she loved most in this world. (p214)"

"Every now and then a crow would soar past with a gold ring or coat button in its beak, a shiny souvenir of murder. (p298)"

"As a feminist, I believe that individuals on their own cannot change the culture; individual solutions don’t have traction. It takes a mass movement to really change things."

"Once a writer has published a book, it belongs to its readers."

"Each generation must define the problems anew, from their own observations and experience."

"The persecution of people who are different, whether it's women as witches, whether it's Jews, whoever it is, it always comes from the same place of being against anyone who's different. Fear of the other."

"She was finally here, in the place where she had found a future. Still, night after night, the past was with her. (p197)"

"Human lives were like quicksilver; let go and they vanished. But not this time. (p319)"

"Know that the only remedy for love is to love more."

"It was a wonder, a message that all things were possible, even in this cruel world. (p215)"

"Two brilliant colleagues who were now wearing rags, carrying their children on their backs, thinking of starvation rather than algebra. (p116)"

"Artists have themes that they go back to—that they are haunted by and obsessed with."