Quote

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

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Bernard Malamud
Age: 71 †
Born: 1914
Born: April 26
Died: 1986
Died: March 18
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Body
Bodies
Best
Loneliness
Live
Lonely
Matter
Matters
Insects
Way
Mystery
Island
Men
Stars
Cosmos
Easy
Islands
Sense
Separate

More quotes by Bernard Malamud

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When I don't feel hurt, I hope they bury me.
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All men are Jews, though few men know it.
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Without heroes, we are all plain people and don't know how far we can go.
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A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.
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Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.
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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.
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The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime
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The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
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There is in the darkness a unity, if you will, that cannot be achieved in any other environment, a blending of self with what the self perceives, and exquisite mystical experience.
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First drafts are for learning what your story is about.
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I write a book at least three times-once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.
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The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course
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... it's possible to let love fly by like a cloud in a windy sky if one is too timid, or perhaps unable to believe he is entitled to good fortune.
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As long as a man stays alive he can't tell what chances will pop up next. But a dead man signs no checks.
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Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.
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It was all those biographies in me yelling, 'We want out. We want to tell you what we've done to you.'
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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
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What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.
Bernard Malamud
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I fix what's broken - except in the heart.
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I sometimes confuse myself with the little I know.
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