On a royal birthday every house must fly a flag, or the owner would be dragged to a police station and be fined twenty-five rubles.

A characteristic thing about the aspiring immigrant is the fact that he is not content to progress alone. Solitary success is imperfect success in his eyes. He must take his family with him as he rises.

Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth.

A little instruction in the elements of chartography—a little practice in the use of the compass and the spirit level, a topographical map of the town common, an excursion with a road map—would have given me a fat round earth in place of my paper ghost.

The czar always got his dues, no matter if it ruined a family.

You went up to be examined with the other Jewish children, your heart heavy about that matter of your nose.

It is not that I belong to the past, but the past that belongs to me.