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In recompense, envy may be the subtlest - perhaps I should say the most insidious - of the seven deadly sins.

Joseph Epstein

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Joseph Epstein
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: January 9
Essayist
Short Story Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Aristides
Insidious
Deadly
Sins
Envy
Seven
Sin
Perhaps
Subtlest
May
Recompense

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Someone — Cyril Connolly? Ezra Pound? — once said that anything that can be read twice is literature I would say that anything that bears saying twice is quotable.
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The pleasure of jogging and running is rather like that of wearing a fur coat in Texas in August: the true joy comes in being able to take the damn thing off.
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Food has it over sex for variety. Hedonistically, gustatory possibilities are much broader than copulatory ones.
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I am married to someone I love.
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If geniuses can sometimes make mistakes, cannot the rest of us on occasion be geniuses?
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I believe it was Gayelord Hauser, the nutritionist, who said, 'You are what you eat,' but if you happen to be an intellectual, you are what you quote.
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A cat is the only domestic animal I know who toilet trains itself and does a damned impressive job of it.
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The decisive moment in the defeat of upper class, capital-S, Society may have come when, in newspapers all over the nation, what used to be call the Society page was replaced by the Style section.
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I am the heterosexual Truman Capote.
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Envy is never general, but always very particular - at least envy of the kind one feels strongly.
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Courage is nine-tenths context. What is courageous in one setting can be foolhardy in another and even cowardly in a third.
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No nostalgia runs deeper than that for something one has never known and now cannot obtain.
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No one has really ever defined what a friend is.
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I am not merely a habitual quoter but an incorrigible one. I am, I may as well face it, more quotatious than an old stock-market ticker-tape machine, except that you can't unplug me.
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One serious drawback about letters is that, in order to get them, one must send some out. When it comes to the mail, I feel it is better to receive than to give.
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The problem for me is that reading is, I won't say a sacred, but nevertheless a pretty serious act.
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What distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, and what we do to make them come about.
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For me writing is foremost a mode of thinking and when it works well, an act of discovery
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My wife who is non-Jewish regrets it all the time that I can say these terrible things about fellow Jews and she can't.
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Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.
Joseph Epstein