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No one has really ever defined what a friend is.

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
Defined
Friend
Ever
Really

More quotes by Joseph Epstein

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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.
Joseph Epstein
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No nostalgia runs deeper than that for something one has never known and now cannot obtain.
Joseph Epstein
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That wine drinking is more effete than beer drinking? No question.
Joseph Epstein
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We do choose how we shall live
Joseph Epstein
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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.
Joseph Epstein
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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.
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.
Joseph Epstein
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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.
Joseph Epstein
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Within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live.
Joseph Epstein
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The problem for me is that reading is, I won't say a sacred, but nevertheless a pretty serious act.
Joseph Epstein
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If geniuses can sometimes make mistakes, cannot the rest of us on occasion be geniuses?
Joseph Epstein
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Food has it over sex for variety. Hedonistically, gustatory possibilities are much broader than copulatory ones.
Joseph Epstein
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Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.
Joseph Epstein
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I myself think anti-Semitism is about envy.
Joseph Epstein
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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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What distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, and what we do to make them come about.
Joseph Epstein
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For me writing is foremost a mode of thinking and when it works well, an act of discovery
Joseph Epstein
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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
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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.
Joseph Epstein
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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.
Joseph Epstein