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Envy is never general, but always very particular - at least envy of the kind one feels strongly.

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
Kind
Always
Never
Strongly
Envy
General
Particular
Least
Feels

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One of the pleasures of being a Jew, I don't have to tell you, it allows you anti-Semitism.
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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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We do choose how we shall live
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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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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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For me writing is foremost a mode of thinking and when it works well, an act of discovery
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No one has really ever defined what a friend is.
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If geniuses can sometimes make mistakes, cannot the rest of us on occasion be geniuses?
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That wine drinking is more effete than beer drinking? No question.
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I am the heterosexual Truman Capote.
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Within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live.
Joseph Epstein
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In recompense, envy may be the subtlest - perhaps I should say the most insidious - of the seven deadly sins.
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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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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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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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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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What distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, and what we do to make them come about.
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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 all great teachers appear to have in common is love of their subject, an obvious satisfaction in rousing this love in their students, and an ability to convince them that what they are being taught is deadly serious
Joseph Epstein