Top 82 Mordecai Quotes
#1. I get the impression that Mordecai misinterpreted Esther's message. It sounded to him like she was trying to hide her nationality and avoid the responsibility of presenting herself to the king. Had he seen and heard her in person, he probably would have judged her differently.
Warren W. Wiersbe
#2. I am not sure,' Mordecai told Thomas, 'whether omens can be trusted.'
'Of course they can.'
'I should like to hear your reasons. But show me your urine first.'
'You said I was cured,' Thomas protested. 'Eternal vigilance, dear Thomas, is the price of health. Piss for me.
Bernard Cornwell
#3. I don't know about you, but I say we shoot the fuckers, bury the bodies and deny they were ever here. - Mordecai
Lora Leigh
#4. I'm starting to think Mordecai bound you to someone's grandmother instead of the earth, because that's what you're starting to sound like!" barked Harold in a slightly louder voice. "Just like my Nanna, next you'll be complaining about your rheumatism.
Michael G. Manning
#5. Mary had Joseph. Esther had Mordecai. Ruth had Boaz. We will not become the women God intends us to be without the guidance, counsel, wisdom, strength, and love of good men in our lives.
John Eldredge
#6. The process hasn't changed, but the writer has developed. I still get up every morning and go to work.
Mordecai Richler
#8. For the record, pot, like the Reader's Digest , is not necessarily habit-forming, but both can lead to hard-core addiction : heroin, in one case, abridged bad books, in the other. Either way you look at it, a withdrawal from a meaningful life.
Mordecai Richler
#9. When the Negro cries with pain from his deep hurt and lays his petition for elemental justice before the nation, he is calling upon the American people to kindle about that crucible of race relationships the fires of American faith.
Mordecai Wyatt Johnson
#10. There are a lot of Christians who are halfway fellows. They stand in the door, holding on to the Church with one hand while they play with the toys of the world with the other. They are in the doorway and we can't bring sinners in.
Mordecai Ham
#11. There are ten commandments, right? Well, it's like an exam. You get eight out of ten, you're just about top of the class.
Mordecai Richler
#12. You can't touch music, but music can touch you
Mordecai
#13. In Canada, nobody is ever overthrown because nobody gives a damn.
Mordecai Richler
#15. Mr. Bernard died on a Monday, at the age of seventy-five, his body wasted. He lay in state for two days in the lobby of the Bernard Gursky Tower and, as he failed to rise on the third, he was duly buried.
Mordecai Richler
#16. If you don't count some of Jehovah's injunctions, there are no humorists in the Bible.
Mordecai Richler
#17. The Canadian kid who wants to grow up to be Prime Minister isn't thinking big, he is setting a limit to his ambitions rather early.
Mordecai Richler
#18. Ernst was still in the Eastern Zone, about ninety kilometres from Berlin, when the truck emerged so inexplicably out of nowhere that it seemed to have been created by the rain itself.
Mordecai Richler
#19. You're convinced that anybody who meets you for the first time will consider you a shit, so you take preventive action. Relax, boychick. When they get to know you better they will realize that they were right. You are a shit.
Mordecai Richler
#20. The truth is Canada is a cloud-cuckoo-land, an insufferably rich country governed by idiots, its self-made problems offering comic relief to the ills of the real world out there, where famine and racial strife and vandals in office are the unhappy rule.
Mordecai Richler
#21. Cripples are not the stuff of romance. Only Lord Byron, dragging his club foot, springs to mind as an exception to the rule, but such a failing in a man is regarded as interesting, even provocative, rather than disfiguring. Women must submit to a more exacting measure.
Mordecai Richler
#22. A boy can be two, three, four potential people, but a man is only one. He murders the others.
Mordecai Richler
#23. Dad played with me a great deal, as dads should do, and our chief sport was baseball. He bought me a hardball when I was three years old, and he used to sit in a rocker on the front porch while I sat on the grass in the yard, and we'd play catch by the hour.
Mordecai Brown
#24. Fiorito has all the right stuff. His splendid memoir about his relationship with his dying father belongs on that small shelf with Philip Roth's Patrimony and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.
Mordecai Richler
#25. And then I began to drift, fighting tears. I used to come here with Miriam. Miriam, my heart's desire. What was troubling her this morning? Maybe Kate had reproached her on the phone for leaving me? How dare Kate.
Oh yeah? Go for it, my darling. Remind her of what she's missing. No, don't.
Mordecai Richler
#26. If you caricature friends in your first novel they will be upset, but if you don't they will feel betrayed.
Mordecai Richler
#27. I don't hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens, understood more about the human condition than ever occurred to any of you. You overrated bunch of charlatans deal with the grammar of human problems, and the writers I've mentioned with the essence.
Mordecai Richler
#28. Nothing like a challenging kill.
Mordecai
#29. We want a revival to come just in our way. You never saw two revivals come just alike. We must let them come in God's way. People are ashamed to admit they need a revival.
Mordecai
#30. I guess I set a world record for errors. I had a pretty good arm, see, but I didn't have much control.
Mordecai Brown
#31. In a nutshell, I am not unaware of my failings. Neither am I a stranger to irony.
Mordecai Richler
#32. Some of the attitudes of Barney are certainly attitudes I share, but not all.
Mordecai Richler
#33. Acquiring a dog may be the only opportunity a human ever has to choose a relative.
Mordecai Wyatt Johnson
#34. I thought, breaking into a sweat, I'd better call Saul. I owe Kate an apology ... Damn damn damn.
Mordecai Richler
#35. Thousands of miles of wheat, indifference, and self- apology.
Mordecai Richler
#36. The time is past when Christians in America can take a long spoon and hand the gospel to the black man out the back door.
Mordecai Wyatt Johnson
#37. There's no such thing as a superhuman. But the only thing I got to tell you, if you take a dog and kick him around he's got to be alert, he's got to be more sharper than you. Well, we've been kicked around for two thousand years. We're not more smarter, we're more alert.
Mordecai Richler
#38. All the same, it strikes me as unfair that I still have to defend myself against her moral judgements. My continuing need for her approbation is pathetic. Twice now I have stopped myself on the street to remonstrate with her, a crazy old coot talking to himself.
Mordecai Richler
#40. Without a doubt, it [Canada] is the land God gave to Cain.
Mordecai Richler
#41. Now they have come to the place where their faith can no longer feed on the bread of repression and violence. They ask for the bread of liberty, of public equality, and public responsibility. It must not be denied them.
Mordecai Wyatt Johnson
#43. Do you think she'd mind if, after the dinner, I slipped out for an hour and maybe caught the third period in the Forum?'
'Brides tend to be touchy about things like that.
Mordecai Richler
#44. I obviously prefer writing novels but I take my journalism very seriously, and I enjoy doing it between novels. It gives me an opportunity to move in the outside world.
Mordecai Richler
#45. Shame on you. Don't tell me you've been married for an hour and you've already got eyes for another woman.
Mordecai Richler
#46. Obviously the raven with the unquenchable itch was at it again, playing tricks on the world and its creatures. Once by air, he thought, and now by water.
Mordecai Richler
#48. Who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this.
Mordecai
#49. Bad days my memory functions no better than an out-of-focus kaleidoscope, but other days me recall is painfully perfect.
Mordecai Richler
#50. If you are not willing to take the shame on yourself, you then let it remain on Jesus Christ. You must bear the reproach of your sinful state of indifference, or the cause of our Master must bear it.
Mordecai
#52. And furthermore did you know that behind the discovery of America there was a Jewish financier?
Mordecai Richler
#53. I'm rambling again. Wandering off the point. But this is the true story of my wasted life ...
Mordecai Richler
#54. Nothing is absolute any longer. There is a choice of beliefs and a choice of truths to go with them. If you choose not to choose then there is no truth at all. There are only points of view.
Mordecai Richler
#55. The Negro people of America ... have cut our forests, tilled our fields, built our railroads, fought our battles, and in all of their trials they have manifested a simple faith, a grateful heart, a cheerful spirit, and an undivided loyalty .
Mordecai Wyatt Johnson
#56. I have always been skeptical of medical orthodoxies, because sooner, rather than later, so many of them are turned on their heads. Or, put another way, providing you are prepared to wait it out, what was adjudged bad for you yesterday is likely to prove beneficial today.
Mordecai Richler
#57. Western civilization, Christianity, decency are struggling for their very lives. In this worldwide civil war, race prejudice is our most dangerous enemy, for it is a disease at the very root of our democratic life.
Mordecai Wyatt Johnson
#58. Well, when I was a young writer the people we read were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Camus, Celine, Malraux. And to begin with, I was a bit of a copycat writer and very derivative and tried to write a novel using their voices, really ... I keep it out of print.
Mordecai Richler
#59. I am an only child, and I guess was spoiled by my parents.
Mordecai Brown
#60. Coming from Canada, being a writer and Jewish as well, I have impeccable paranoia credentials.
Mordecai Richler
#62. This is an age of scientific wonders. You miss somebody so you pick up the phone to say hello. Three minutes for sixty-five cents. Nobody goes broke.
Mordecai Richler
#63. Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.
Mordecai Richler
#64. We live in the country, and I have a huge library there. When we go to London for the winter I never know which books to take. I never know what I am going to need. That's the only disadvantage.
Mordecai Richler
#65. Better my right hand should have been cut off. Go know I was setting in motion events that would lead to the ruin of one of the few truly good men I ever met.
Mordecai Richler
#66. I'm criticized by the feminists, by the Jewish establishment, by Canadian nationalists. And why not? I've had my pot shots at them. I'm fair game.
Mordecai Richler
#67. Now they always accuse me of carrying around a sledge hammer with which to pound the church members. Yes sir, I do pound them, every time I come down, I knock one of the halfway fellows out of the doorway, and every time I knock one out I get a sinner in.
Mordecai Ham
#69. I had an overwhelming experience of the Lord's presence. I felt so powerfully overcome by the nearness of the Holy Spirit that I had to ask the Lord to draw back lest He kill me. It was so glorious that I couldn't stand more than a small portion of it.
Mordecai Ham
#70. The revolution eats its own. Capitalism re-creates itself.
Mordecai Richler
#71. If you vote for Al Smith, you're voting against Christ and you will all be damned.
Mordecai Ham
#72. We're living under the illusion that we have the power to determine what to do with it.
Mordecai Wyatt Johnson
#73. Listen your Lordship, I'm a respecter of institutions. Even in Paris, I remained a Canadian. I puffed hashish, but I didn't inhale.
Mordecai Richler
#74. I work every day - or at least I force myself into office or room. I may get nothing done, but you don't earn bonuses without putting in time. Nothing may come for three months, but you don't earn the fourth without it.
Mordecai Richler
#75. I didn't know about beauty, he had thought. Nobody ever told me.
Mordecai Richler
#76. If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.
Mordecai Richler
#77. Wherever I travel I'm too late. The orgy has moved elsewhere,
Mordecai Richler
#78. But the truth is, nothing delights me more than a biography of one of the truly great that proves he or she was an absolute shit.
Mordecai Richler
#79. Actually, when it comes to knocking the Canadian cultural scene, nobody outdoes Canadians, myself included. We are veritable masters of self-deprecation.
Mordecai Richler
#80. There are three sides to every argument. Yours. The other guy's. And the right side.
Mordecai Richler
#81. There will be a meeting of the great powers who will disagree, and the next noise we hear will be the screeching of elevators going up and down from heaven to hell.
Mordecai Wyatt Johnson
#82. All writing is about the same thing - it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration it creates
Mordecai Richler
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