Quotes from Isaac Bashevis Singer

Si el destino de un hombre depende de la desgracia de otro, entonces no existe buena fortuna para nadie.

How is it possible, after all, that someone should simply vanish? How can someone who lived, loved, and wrangled with God and with himself just disappear? I don't know how and in what sense but they're here. Since time is an illusion, why shouldn't everything remain?

Wir laufen davon, und der Berg Sinai läuft hinter uns her. Diese Jagd hat uns krank gemacht.

Ich erinnere mich noch an Ihre Worte: "Die Welt ist ein Schlachthaus und ein Bordell." Damals schien mir das übertrieben, aber es ist bittere Wahrheit. Man hält Sie für einen Mystiker, aber in Wirklichkeit sind Sie durch und durch Realist. Wie dem auch sei, alles wird uns aufgezwungen, selbst die Hoffnung.

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.

After a while Zeinvel said, "I haven't forgotten her. If there is a Gehenna, I want to lie next to her on one bed of nails.

The waste basket is the writer's best friend.

A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise… Because that is how life is — full of surprises.

We expected a large gathering, because it is the nature of people to forget a saint while he is alive and give him all honors at his death.

Meir the eunuch clutched his naked chin where a beard should have grown.

The latter was in praise of the virtuous wife, rarer than a pearl.

Could a man really know what was best for him? How easily men were deluded by a word, a smile, a gesture.

A lion attacks a herd of zebras and kills one. The frightened zebras run for a while and then they stop and start to graze again. Do they have a choice?

I had already discovered that there was no limit to how much suffering I can bear.

But to the last question, Zelig replied, he probably flew to beyond the Dark Regions, where people don't go and cattle don't stray, where the sky is copper, the earth iron, and where the evil forces live under roofs of petrified toadstools and in tunnels abandoned by moles.

She had learned to drink in Russia.

They are all insane: the Communists, the Fascists, the preachers of democracy, the writers, the painters, the clergy, the atheists. Soon technology, too, will disintegrate. Buildings will collapse, power plants will stop generating electricity. Generals will drop atomic bombs on their own populations. Mad revolutionaries will run in the streets, crying fantastic slogans. I have often thought that it would begin in New York. This metropolis has all the symptoms of a mind gone berserk.

However, the courage to take a rope and hang one's self, or jump out of a window, I do not have. Only those who are not accustomed to pain can do that.

It is written that it is better to be burned in a kiln than to shame another," my father said.

How far is living from dying?

Can a condemned tribe lead itself to its own burial?

There is some mysterious strength in fools. They are deeply rooted in the primeval chaos.

Oh, men have no compassion on themselves!

A real friend is a friend in need, not those who wait until your luck changes.