If you keep saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet.

What do these children do without storybooks?" Naftali asked. And Reb Zebulun replied: "They have to make do. Storybooks aren't bread. You can live without them." I couldn't live without them." Naftali said.

Literature is the memory of humanity.

It is a fact that the classics of Yiddish literature are also the classics of the modern Hebrew literature.

Every body resisted (the slaughterer) in its own fashion, tried to escape and seemed to argue with the Creator to its last breath.

But my gloom did not lessen. I knew that I'd had a bad dream, and I stood in the dark trying to recollect it. The second I closed my eyes, I was with the dead. They did things words cannot express. They spoke madness. ("Hanka")

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.