Top 80 Bernard Malamud Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “You see in others who you are.”

— Bernard Malamud

52. “It’s one thing for a man not to know, not to have learned; it’s another not to be able to live by what one does know.”

— Bernard Malamud

53. “A man is an island in the only sense that matters, not an easy way to be. We live in mystery, a cosmos of separate lonely bodies, men, insects, stars. It is all loneliness and men know it best.”

— Bernard Malamud

54. “We’re persecuted in the most civilized languages.”

— Bernard Malamud

55. “Charity you can give even when you haven’t got.”

— Bernard Malamud

56. “The past exudes legend: one can’t make pure clay of time’s mud.”

— Bernard Malamud

57. “If you don’t hear His voice so let Him hear yours. When prayers go up blessings descend.”

— Bernard Malamud

58. “Space plus whatever you feel equals more whatever you feel, marvelous for happiness, God save you otherwise.”

— Bernard Malamud

59. “The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course.”

— Bernard Malamud

60. “It was a strange thing about people- they could look the same but be different.”

— Bernard Malamud

61. “If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.”

— Bernard Malamud

62. “Prufrock had measured out his life with measuring spoons; Dubin, in books resurrecting the lives of others.”

— Bernard Malamud

63. “Kiev, you understand, is a medieval city full of wild superstition and mysticism. It has always been the heart of Russian reaction. The Black Hundreds, may they sink into their graves, have aroused against you the most ignorant and brutal of the masses. They are deathly afraid of Jews and at the same time frighten them to death. This reveals to you something about the human condition. Rich or poor, those of our brethren who can run out of here are running. Some who can’t are already mourning.”

— Bernard Malamud

64. “The short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime.”

— Bernard Malamud

65. “Writers who can’t invent stories often substitute style for narrative. They remind me of the painter who couldn’t paint people, so he painted chairs.”

— Bernard Malamud

66. “Nobody lived in Eden anymore.”

— Bernard Malamud

67. “As long as a man stays alive he can’t tell what chances will pop up next. But a dead man signs no checks.”

— Bernard Malamud

68. “You can’t eat language but it eases thirst.”

— Bernard Malamud

69. “Children were strangers you loved because you could love. If they gave back love when they were grown you were ahead of the game.”

— Bernard Malamud

70. “She waited uneasily and shyly. From afar he saw that her eyes – clearly her father’s – were filled with desperate innocence. He pictured, in her, his own redemption. Violins and lit candles revolved in the sky. Leo ran forward with flowers out-thrust.”

— Bernard Malamud

71. “Since I can’t be a professional on account of lack of education I wouldn’t mind being wealthy.”

— Bernard Malamud

72. “A man has to construct, invent, his freedom.”

— Bernard Malamud

73. “Keep in mind, Yakov Shepsovitch, that if your life is without value, so is mine. If the law does not protect you, it will not, in the end, protect me. Therefore I dare not fail you, and that is what causes me anxiety – that I must not fail you.”

— Bernard Malamud

74. “She is not for you. She is a wild one – wild, without shame. This is not a bride for a rabbi”.”

— Bernard Malamud

75. “In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.”

— Bernard Malamud

76. “A writer has to surprise himself to be worth reading.”

— Bernard Malamud

77. “Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.”

— Bernard Malamud

78. “It was all those biographies in me yelling, ‘We want out. We want to tell you what we’ve done to you.’”

— Bernard Malamud

79. “Where a boy runs he never forgets.”

— Bernard Malamud

80. “Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.”

— Bernard Malamud

81. “Overnight business could go down enough to hurt; yet as a rule it slowly recovered-sometimes it seemed to take forever-went up, not high enough to be really up, only not down.”

— Bernard Malamud

82. “How can we be strangers if we both believe in God?”

— Bernard Malamud

83. “Mourning died slowly. It never fully dies for something truly loved.”

— Bernard Malamud

84. “But that’s what happened, Freeman, who had often been in love, told himself. Until you were lovers you were strangers.”

— Bernard Malamud

85. “There’s something cursed, it seems to me, about a country where men have owned men as property. The stink of that corruption never escapes the soul, and it is the stink of future evil.”

— Bernard Malamud

86. “I do not have to tell you there has been a disappointing retreat of progress in recent times, whatever it is we call progress, especially disappointing because of the little we have had since the Emancipation. There’s something cursed, it seems to me, about a country where men have owned men as property. The stink of that corruption never escapes the soul, and it is the stink of future evil. Still, the original decrees have not been withdrawn and are therefore the law.”

— Bernard Malamud

87. “Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.”

— Bernard Malamud

88. “Who are you, Yakov, Moses himself? If you don’t hear His voice so let Him hear yours. ‘When prayers go up blessings descend.’” “Scorpions descend, hail, fire, sharp rocks, excrement. For that I don’t need God’s help, the Russians are enough.”

— Bernard Malamud

89. “Yakov,” said Shmuel, “He invented light. He created the world. He made us both. The true miracle is belief. I believe in Him. Job said, ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in Him.’ He said more but that’s enough.” “To win a lousy bet with the devil he killed off all the servants and innocent children of Job. For that alone I hate him, not to mention ten thousand pogroms. Ach, why do you make me talk fairy tales? Job is an invention and so is God.”

— Bernard Malamud