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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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Joseph Epstein
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: January 9
Essayist
Short Story Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Aristides
Serious
Pretty
Reading
Problem
Nevertheless
Sacred

More quotes by Joseph Epstein

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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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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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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
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If geniuses can sometimes make mistakes, cannot the rest of us on occasion be geniuses?
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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.
Joseph Epstein
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That wine drinking is more effete than beer drinking? No question.
Joseph Epstein
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I am the heterosexual Truman Capote.
Joseph Epstein
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We do choose how we shall live
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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For me writing is foremost a mode of thinking and when it works well, an act of discovery
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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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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What distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, and what we do to make them come about.
Joseph Epstein
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One of the pleasures of being a Jew, I don't have to tell you, it allows you anti-Semitism.
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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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.
Joseph Epstein
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Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.
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