Essayists From The United States

"Encouraged by the old surgical saw "Any idiot can amputate a led," Ghosh had decided to proceed. If he hesitated, it was because the rest of the saying went "but it takes a skilled surgeon to save one.""

"You can’t walk across a lake just because you change its name to “land.” Labels matter."

"Her skills were so rare, so needed for the poorest of the poor, and even at times in the royal palace, that she felt valued. Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted?"

"The ritual of immigration and baggage claim at Kennedy Airport went by so quickly that I wondered if I'd missed it. Where were the armed soldiers? The dogs? The long lines? The body searches? Where were the tables where your luggage was laid open and a knife taken to the lining?"

"Worry and anxiety are sand in the machinery of life, and faith is the oil."

"Sometimes we have to “live the question,” not push for the answer."

"In a life, it is the in-betweens that are fatal."

"Sholem Asch and Isaac Bashevis Singer reflected through the prism of their personalities and unique talents the soul of the jew as a human being, and in this way they became universal writers."

"In the terrible revolutionary upheaval in the Jewish towns of Russia at the beginning of this century, when the entire Jewish youth was drawn into the vortex and confusion of strife, Asch remained loyal to his art. Not that he was indifferent to the momentous events, not that those terrible days failed to stir his soul and heat his blood. Nay, he saw all, he absorbed and responded. But this he did not as a worker, not as a participant in the struggle, not as a zealot, or a believer or soldier; but as the artist, as the dreamer, philosopher and interpreter and painter of emotions and impressions. This is also true of his attitude to the agitation over the Jewish problem that shook Russian Judaism in those days of storm and unrest. The questions of Zionism, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, the revival of Palestinism, the amalgamation of national and revolutionary principles, the neo-chassidism, these and many other creeds that sprang into life during those memorable days influenced Asch not as a crusader for one cause or the other, but as an interpreter of them all, as an artist purely and faithfully."

"the great Sholem Asch never sees women as they really are, but rather as he would like them to be, that is, saintly and self-sacrificing. Her heart overflowing with love, the Yiddish literary heroine is ready to throw away her life for the man she loves and the people she loves. Asch's favourite female type is the mother. As is well-known, Asch suffered from a mother-fixation, a fixation that leads him to the apotheosis of all mother figures in the novel Mary, the third volume of his Christian trilogy. Even in earlier work - for instance, Kiddush-Hashem and "The Sorceress of Castille" - Asch describes his heroines, Dvora and Jephta, as if they were Jewish versions of the Virgin Mary. But Asch never shows us the human complexity that troubles his heroines' souls. In fact, in the course of the entire narrative of "The Sorceress of Castille," Jephta does not utter a single word."

"The only famous Yiddish stories from Latin America I'm able to make people invoke are the handful of ones by the masters Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. They are set in, or at least refer to, Argentina (and on occasion in an eternally rainy Brazil) and invariably deal with the Jewish prostitution ring-la trata de blancas."

"Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence."

"Suffering, my son, is the fount of love. Suffering is the grace, the great grace, which our Father in heaven pours down upon us. For suffering gives men submissive hearts. He that does not suffer thinks that he stands upon a mighty rock which he himself has raised. He does not see his brother; he sees only himself. He believes in no one; he believes only in his own strength. His heart becomes a swamp which swarms with reptiles: pride, obstinacy, and self-love. And when his footstool is rolled away from under him, he sinks, together with all the reptiles, into the depths of hell. But he to whom God has granted suffering shall find his pains like ropes which bind him to his Father in heaven. His heart is awake to feel the pains of his brother in need. He sends afflictions upon you and makes you small on earth that you may be great in heaven."

"When an idea, summoned by need and discontent, fails to be realized, an alien dark force, conceived by the devil, arrives and bestially throws itself into the void left by the ideal. It utilizes the despair created by the unrealized ideal, often operates with the same phrases, sows the same hopes until it wins over the deceived masses to its side. Like Satan, it stands upon the structure erected by the ideal, to usurp power. A clear example of this is the rise of Hitlerism in Germany. Nazism was made ripe by the leadership of German Social Democracy which had failed to fulfill its duty towards the embittered German masses. If German Social Democracy had used the power which bankrupt German Junkerdom so completely delivered over to it, if German Social Democracy had realized the revolutionary program which it had preached for generations, Hitler could not have deceived the German masses with a promise that he would realize the program in his own manner."

"Considering the world scene in this light, one can say with certainty that if Lenin had not succeeded in carrying through the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and power had remained in the weak, half-traitorous hands of Russian Social Democracy, a Russian Hitler and a Russian Nazism would have arisen a decade earlier than in Germany. There would have been no Red Army to destroy Nazism and fascism today. The world is only now beginning to enjoy the fruit of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. It is thanks only to the Bolshevik Revolution that the world will arise cleansed of Hitler, even if wounded and bloody."

"The masses have learned the great lesson of what happens to an ideal when traitors abandon it to the enemy. German Social Democracy, Noske and Hitler, will forever stand before the eyes of the people like black shadows to teach them in whose hands to entrust power."

"The joy and hope which the Red Army marching forward calls forth in the hearts of the tortured masses, also throws fear and dread into the enemy's heart, into the hearts of the fascists of all colors, into the hearts of all the debased human worms who have the sorry courage to aid fascism, to give it comfort, to whitewash it and to deliver into its hands the fate of the Jewish masses. Woe to such misleaders!"

"You don’t think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell’s own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb."

"Oh, it was work and no fooling. I enjoyed it very much, because I didn’t have to do it."

"I found a man who claimed he used to be a radio engineer. And if he was an engineer, I was Albert Einstein’s mother, but at least he knew which end of a soldering iron was hot."

"What will come of these things? That is a fair question. Unfortunately there is no answer. Not yet. If we knew the answer in advance, we would not have to perform the experiment."

"It was a nasty day in late December, just before the holidays. The weather was cold, wet, and miserable—well, I said it was London, didn’t I?"

"There’s an editor for you. They’re all the same. At first they’re all honey and sweet talk, with those long alcoholic lunches and blue-sky conversation about million-copy printings while they wheedle you into signing the contract. Then they turn nasty. They want the actual book delivered. When they don’t get it, or when the censors say they can’t print it, then there isn’t any more sweet talk and all the conversation is about how the aediles will escort you to debtors’ prison."

"Scientists are an agnostic lot, of course—well, most educated people are, aren’t they?"

"“You could rule the nation—and yet you don’t seem to go after that power.” The mayor frowned. “Power, Mrs. O’Hare? You mean the chance to make laws and compel others to do what you want them to? Why, good heavens, Mrs. O’Hare, who in his right mind would want that?”"

"“See, there’s a bit of a problem here. It’s true that editors are always begging for something new and different, but if you’re dumb enough to try to give it to them they don’t recognize it. When they ask for ‘different,’ what they mean is something right down the good old ‘different’ groove.”"

"“See, we don’t go in for your so-called ‘birth control’ here. No abortion. No contraception. We accept the gift of life when it is given. We believe that every human being, from the moment of conception on, has a right to a life—although,” he added, “not necessarily a long one.”"

"He said in an injured tone: “Mister, naturally the staff won’t bother your stuff. What kind of a hotel do you think this is? “Of course, of course,” I said. But I knew he was lying, because I knew what kind of hotel it was. The staff was there only because being there gave them a chance to knock down more money than they could make any other way. What other kind of hotel was there?"

"It is a constant wonder to me how crazy a sane person can get."

"“Would it help, do you think, if I canceled this operation and tried to get you, the other you, on the phone? President-to-President? A one-on-one talk?” “Why, I think that would depend on what you said, Mr. President,” she said thoughtfully. “I’d say the truth!” he barked. “Might be an interesting change, at that.”"

"She laughed out loud. It was a very nice laugh. No girl looks beautiful when she’s laughing hard, and girls who worry about looking beautiful don’t do it. Dorotha Keefer looked like a healthy, pretty girl having a good time, which when you come down to it is about the best way for a girl to look."

"A soft drink and a couple of Twinkies didn’t make a meal, but at least they informed my stomach my intentions were good."

"Specialization is the goal of civilization."

"She described herself as happy. This diagnosis did not come from any welling up of joy inside herself. It came from the observed fact, looking at herself objectively, that whenever she decided she wanted something she always got it, and what other definition of happiness could there be?"

"Don Kayman was too good a scientist to confuse his hopes with observations. He would report what he found. But he knew what he wanted to find."

"Even money, thought Roger on the way back to his own office, is not a bad bet. Of course, it depends on the stakes."

"I don’t think you know what it’s like to have someone head over heels in love with you. What’s the good of a man who’s upside down?"

"I delighted his fussy little soul, because by adding what I remembered of Navy protocol to what he was able to teach me of Army routine, we came up with as snarled a mass of red tape as any field-grade officer in the whole history of all armed forces had been able to accumulate. Oh, I tell you, nobody sneezed in New York without a report being made out in triplicate, with eight endorsements. Of course there wasn’t anybody to send them to, but that didn’t stop the Major. He said with determination: “Nobody’s ever going to chew me out for noncompliance with regulations—even if I have to invent the regulations myself!”"

"Is there any of me, or of any of us, that isn’t just consequence? I think, and I’ve thought it over a lot, that everything that ever happened keeps on happening, extending tendrils of itself endlessly into the moving present tense of time, porducing its echoes, and explosions and extinctions forever."

"Increase of population was always good news to us. More people, more sales. Decrease of IQ was always good news to us. Less brains, more sales."

"He drew himself up and said with dignity: “We administer justice, Mr. Courtenay. And an ancient, basic tenet of justice is: ‘Better that one thousand innocents suffer unjustly than one guilty person be permitted to escape.’”"

"He wasn’t very confident of analysis as a solution to his problem; despite three centuries, the technique of mental health had never evolved a rigorous proof system, and Cornut was innately skeptical of whatever was not susceptible of mathematical analysis."

"Anybody who sets out to turn the world upside down has no right to complain if he gets caught in its gears."

"That’s power, Mitch, absolute power. And you know the old saying. Power ennobles. Absolute power ennobles absolutely."

"‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time—’ That’s the sort of thing she would have written before the rise of advertising. The correlation is perfectly clear. Advertising up, lyric poetry down."

"What helped most of all was the utter joy Cornut took in it all. It was, after all, his life. As he led the class, he felt again the wonder he himself had felt, sitting in a class like this one. He hardly heard the buzz from the class as he put his pointer down to gesture, and blindly picked it up again, still talking. Teaching mathematics was a kind of hypnosis for him, an intense, gut-wrenching absorption that had gripped him from the time of his first math class."

"It was an appeal to reason, and they’re always dangerous. You can’t trust reason. We threw it out of the ad profession long ago and have never missed it."

"When you spend weeks on end close to another person, so close that you know every hiccough, every smell and every scratch on the skin, you either come out of it hating each other or so deep in each other's gut that you can't find a way out. Klara and I were both. Our little love affair had turned into a Siamese-twin relationship. There wasn't any romance in it. There wasn't room enough between us for romance to occur. And yet I knew every inch of Klara, every pore, and every thought, far better than I'd known my own mother. And in the same way: from the womb out. I was surrounded by Klara."

"When my mother died and left me it hurt, but I was poor and confused and used to hurting. When the love of my life, or at any rate the woman who seemed to come to be the love of my life after she was safely gone, also left me — without quite dying, because she was stuck in some awful astrophysical anomaly and far out of reach forever — that also hurt. But I was hurting all over anyway then. I wasn't used to happiness, hadn't formed the habit of it. There is a Carot's law to pain. It is measured not by absolutes, but the difference between source and ambience, and my ambience had been too safe and too pleasurable for too long to equip me for this. I was in shock."

"There is no greater dark than the dark between the stars."