Isaac Bashevis Singer Quotes

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?

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

A soldier who serves an emperor has to have a uniform, and this also applies to a soldier who serves the Almighty.

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.

Kindness, I’ve discovered, is everything in life.

إذا كان الإله حكيمًا فكيف تكون هناك حماقة؟ وإذا كان الإله هو الحياة فكيف يكون هناك موت؟ إني أرقد بالليل، رجل ضئيل، ذبابة نصف مسحوقة وأتحدث إلى الأموات وإلى الأحياء، وإلى الإله إن كان موجودًا، وإلى الشيطان الموجود يقينًا وأسألهم: ما الحاجة إلى كل هذا ؟

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world,
but it is only once removed from the true world. At the
door of the hovel where I lie, there stands the plank on
which the dead are taken away. The gravedigger Jew
has his spade ready. The grave waits and the worms are
hungry; the shrouds are prepared-! carry them in my
beggar's sack. Another shnorrer is waiting to inherit my
bed of straw. When the time comes I will go joyfully.
Whatever may be there, it will be real, without complication,
without ridicule, without deception. God be
praised: there even Gimpel cannot be deceived.

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.

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

I ordered breakfast. I watched someone at the next table working away at his plate of ham with eggs. I had long since come to the conclusion that man's treatment of God's creatures makes mockery of all his ideals and of the whole alleged humanism. In order for this overstuffed individual to enjoy his ham, a living creature had to be raised, dragged to its death, stabbed, tortured, scalded in hot water. The man didn't give a second's thought to the fact the pig was made of the same stuff as he and that it had to pay with suffering and death so that he could taste its flesh. I've thought more than once that when it comes to animals, every man is a Nazi.

Dziobak, the priest, entered. He was a short, broadshouldered man; he looked as if he had been sawed in half and glued and nailed together again, His eyes were green as gooseberries, his eyebrows dense as bushes. He had a thick nose with pimples and a receding chin.

Yiddish has not yet said its last word. It contains treasures that have not been revealed to the eyes of the world. It was the tongue of martyrs and saints, of dreamers and Cabalists — rich in humor and in memories that mankind may never forget. In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful Humanity.

literature can very well describe the absurd, but it should never become absurd itself

Wie ich höre, zeigt auch der Himmel eine Leidenschaft für das Neue. Ein Stern wird müde, ein Stern zu sein, und er explodiert und wird eine Nova.

If one Hitler is dead, there are a million ready to take his place.