Top 100 Isaac Bashevis Singer Quotes
#1. In his enigmatic and cunning story 'The Crown of Feathers,' Isaac Bashevis Singer refuses to produce uncontradictory evidence of God's will but rather mixes all signals, jams the evidence, stalls every conclusion.
Edmund White
#2. There's always a host of voices you're inspired by. I love Don DeLillo, and I love Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I love Beckett, and I love Pinter. He's one of the funniest voices in English literature since Dickens.
Dylan Moran
#3. Even when she was alive, Esther Kreitman's novels, short stories and translations received far less attention than the work of her famous brothers, I. J. and Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Clive Sinclair
#4. We know what a person thinks not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his actions.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#5. One thing I found out then was that pity is a form of love and, actually, its highest expression.
A Tale of Two Sisters
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#7. What do these children do without storybooks?" Naftali asked.
And Reb Zebulun replied: "They have to make do. Storybooks aren't bread. You can live without them."
I couldn't live without them." Naftali said.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#9. The Yiddish mentality is not haughty. It does not take victory for granted. It does not demand and command but it muddles through, sneaks by, smuggles itself amidst the powers of destruction, knowing somewhere that God's plan for Creation is still at the very beginning.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#10. Sometimes you have the feeling that some little imp is standing behind you and dictating to you, but he gives it to you slowly, drop by drop.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#12. Whenever I'm in trouble, I pray. And because I'm in trouble all of the time, I pray almost constantly.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#13. If there would come a voice from God saying, 'I'm against vegetarianism!' I would say, 'Well, I am for it!' This is how
strongly I feel in this regard.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#14. The Jewish people have been in exile for 2,000 years; they have lived in hundreds of countries, spoken hundreds of languages and still they kept their old language, Hebrew. They kept their Aramaic, later their Yiddish; they kept their books; they kept their faith.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#15. There is a quiet humor in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love ... In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of a frightened and hopeful humanity.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#16. When literature becomes overly erudite, it means that interest in the art has gone and curiosity about the artist is what's important. It becomes a kind of idolatry.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#17. If we have people with the power to tell a story, there will always be readers.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#18. Whatever doesn't really happen is dreamed at night. It happens to one if it doesn't happen to another, tomorrow if not today, or a century hence if not next year.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#19. When a day passes, it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories weren't told or books weren't written, man would live like the beasts, only for the day. The whole world, all human life, is one long story.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#21. A rock was sticking out of the water, jagged and pointed, covered with moss
a remnant of the Ice Age. It had withstood the rains, the snows, the frost, the heat. It was afraid of no one. It did not need redemption, it had already been redeemed.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#22. Every body resisted (the slaughterer) in its own fashion, tried to escape and seemed to argue with the Creator to its last breath.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#23. There is great treasure there behind our skull and this is true about all of us. This little treasure has great, great powers, and I would say we only have learnt a very, very small part of what it can do.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#24. To me the Yiddish language and the conduct of those who spoke it are identical.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#25. It is a fact that the classics of Yiddish literature are also the classics of the modern Hebrew literature.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#27. One can find in the Yiddish tongue and in the Yiddish spirit expressions of pious joy, lust for life, longing for the Messiah, patience and deep appreciation of human individuality.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#29. As much as I can give of myself I give of myself. There's no reason why not. And when I have to hide something, I let the character speak.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#31. Dictatorships, wars, and cruelty drive whole countries to madness. My theory is that the human species was crazy from the very first and that civilization and culture are only enhancing man's insanity.
A Tale of Two Sisters
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#32. They still believe in God, the family, angels, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other obsolete stuff.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#35. No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#36. We all play chess with Fate as partner. He makes a move, we make a move. He tries to checkmate us in three moves, we try to prevent it. We know we can't win, but we're driven to give him a good fight.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#37. In many ways, astrology, numerology and palmistry are corruptions of the occult because they have attempted to make a practice out of something that is essentially imaginative.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#39. One prays for life , life means free choice and freedom is mystery . If one knew the truth how could there be freedom
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#40. Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#41. In the half darkness I winked to my other self, my mad dictator, and congratulated him on his droll victory. I closed my eyes and felt the warmth flowing from Shosha's head to my face. What did I have to lose? Nothing more than what everyone loses anyway.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#43. A story to me must have some surprise ... I must have a passion to write the story.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#44. There is no death. How can there be death if everything is part of the Godhead? The soul never dies and the body is never really alive.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#45. Night is a time of rigor, but also of mercy. There are truths which one can see only when it's dark
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#46. Atheism is a sort of crippled mysticism, [...] Blind nature has created all that we see, as well as all that we do not see - that's a mystical notion.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#48. To be a vegetarian is to disagree - to disagree with the course of things today ... starvation, cruelty - we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it's a strong one.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#49. The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#51. Heaven and earth conspire that everything which has been, be rooted and reduced to dust. Only the dreamers, who dream while awake, call back the shadows of the past and braid nets from the unspun thread.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#52. What nature delivers to us is never stale. Because what nature creates has eternity in it.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#55. Literature has neglected the old and their emotions. The novelists never told us that in love, as in other matters, the young are just beginners and that the art of loving matures with age and experience.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#56. In our time, when the literature for adults is deteriorating, good books for children are the only hope, the only refuge.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#57. Some of my cronies call me a pessimist and a decadent, but there is always a background of faith behind resignation.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#58. Writing has power, but its power has no vector. Writers can stir the mind, but they can't direct it. Time changes things, God changes things, the dictators change things, but writers can't change anything.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#59. If you keep on saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#63. The past is not lost. An image from years ago remained present somewhere in the fourth dimension and it reached you just in that moment.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#65. For those who are willing to make an effort, great miracles and wonderful treasures are in store.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#66. There must be a way for man to attain all possible pleasures, all the powers and knowledge that nature can grant him, and still serve God
a God who speaks in deeds, not in words, and whose vocabulary is the Cosmos.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#67. Actually, the true story of a person's life can never be written. It is beyond the power of literature. The full tale of any life would be both utterly boring and utterly unbelievable.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#70. There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#72. There are moments of faith, interspersed with times when the smoke & flames of burning children blot out our faith ... although it flickers again. The difference between the skeptic & the believer is the frequency of faith and not the certitude of one's position.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#73. Man is a disgusting thing. If you beat him he starts to scream, but if it is the other one who is beaten, then he constructs a theory.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#74. I am thankful, of course, for the prize and thankful to God for each story, each idea, each word, each day.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#75. A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#76. The sexual organs are the most sensitive organs of the human being. They are not diplomats. They tell the truth.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#77. The pessimism of the creative person is not decadence but a mighty passion for the redemption of man.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#78. The ghetto was not only a place of refuge for a persecuted minority but a great experiment in peace, in self-discipline and in humanism. As such it still exists and refuses to give up in spite of all the brutality that surrounds it. I was brought up among those people.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#79. What's the good of not believing? Today it's your wife you don't believe; tomorrow it's God Himself you won't take stock in.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#80. As long as people will shed the blood of innocent creatures there can be no peace, no liberty, no harmony between people. Slaughter and justice cannot dwell together.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#82. Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#83. We write not only for children but also for their parents. They, too, are serious children.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#84. I believe in God but people are liars. It's those people who say they are appointed by God who I don't believe in.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#87. When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#88. Literature can very well describe the absurd, but it should never become absurd itself
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#89. When we're trying to decide whether a leader is a good leader or a bad one, the question to ask is: 'Is he with the Ten Commandments or is he against them?' Then you can determine if the leader is a true messiah or another Stalin.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#90. The Rabbi thought he saw an expression of perplexity in the golem's eyes. It seemed to the Rabbi that his eyes were asking, 'Who am I? Why am I here? What is the secret of my being? Rabbi Leib often saw the same bewilderment in the eyes of newborn children and even in the eyes of animals.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#91. There is no such thing as love. Give me a cigarette. In the camp, people climbed on one another like worms.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#93. It is a general rule that when the grain of truth cannot be found, men will swallow great helpings of falsehood.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#94. How can we speak of right and justice if we take an innocent creature and shed its blood? How can we pray to God for mercy if we ourselves have no mercy? Nobel laureate in literature.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#95. God gave us so many emotions, and so many strong ones. Every human being, even if he is an idiot, is a millionaire in emotions.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#96. But my gloom did not lessen. I knew that I'd had a bad dream, and I stood in the dark trying to recollect it. The second I closed my eyes, I was with the dead. They did things words cannot express. They spoke madness. ("Hanka")
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#97. It seems that the analysis of character is the highest human entertainment. And literature does it, unlike gossip, without mentioning names.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#98. In the history of old Jewish literature there was never any basic difference between the poet and the prophet. Our ancient poetry often became law and a way of life.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#99. There is a permanent amnesia planted in us, which just as we keep forgetting our dreams, we sometimes keep on forgetting our reality.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
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