Quotes from Sholom Aleichem

As my mother says, "God is a father. He punishes with one hand and heals with the other." That's something I don't get. Why punish and then heal? You could save yourself the trouble by skipping both.

Well, to quote my mother, a worm lies in horseradish and thinks there's nothing sweeter.

Money on paper is not even paper money," my mother says….

Well, a matchmaker, as you know, can talk a wall into marrying a hole in the ground;

Everyone is going to America and no one has a way of getting there. Some folks have been sent back to Russia. Some have found work in Lemberg. Some have been sent on to Cracow.

A man is only flesh and blood, after all; you can't fill a stomach with words.

Why not teach him a trade?" Pinye says. "Americans work with their hands.

I don't care what I'll be in America. I just want to get there. I'm dying to see the place. I've made up my mind to learn three things there: swimming, writing, and cigar smoking. I mean I can do all three already. But I'll do them better in America.

Nothing lasts forever. And no one is ever satisfied. We're tired of going from door to door for kvawdehz and nikelz. Better your own slice of bread than the next man's loaf.

Don't you know that you can skin the bear in the forest, but you can't sell its hide there?

I weep to think of all the tricks you've played on me since I've had you for a husband …and now, as if all that weren't enough, you decide to become a circus clown. A penny-a-liner! And to think there are even worse fools than you who will pay to read what you write!

Do you know what my grandmother used to say? What a shame it is we have mouths, because if we didn't we'd never go hungry

Being compared to a Russian pogromchik didn't faze that German as much as hearing Brody called Sodom. Did he fly off the handle! The Russians, he said, had the right idea. If you asked him, there should be more pogroms.

How does it say in the Talmud: Who giveth life giveth also the fruit of the vine. Rashi interprets it as: God may be God, but brandy is brandy. L'chayim!

If it's my fate to have a scribbler for a husband, why must you scribble in Yehupetz? Isn't there enough ink in Kasrilevke?

Send us the cure—the affliction we already have.

But after the last straw, there's always more, as my mother says.

P.S. An editorial board is not a piece of wood. It's a group of people that gets together to put out a newspaper.

Meh onu umeh khayeynu—what do folks like us count? Moshul kekheres hanishbor—we're just so much scrap in their eyes. Except that real scrap isn't thrown away so easily …

I don't know how it is with other writers, but I've been treated like the lowest of the low.

You see, I come from Mezritch, though I grew up in Mazapevke, but Vorotolivke is where I'm still registered.

Then she held out her hands, though all she could say was a single whispered word: "Pa-pa …" Please don't think any worse of me for having tears in my eyes now.

choosing his words very carefully, like someone slowly eating matza.

In short, he kept waiving me such waivers that I waved goodbye to him and went to see a third lawyer, that's where I went.