Such creatures of accident are we, liable to a thousand deaths before we are born. But once we are here, we may create our own world, if we choose.

The past was only my cradle, and now it cannot hold me, because I am grown too big.

I have so little mastered the art of tranquil living that wherever I go I trail storm clouds of drama around me.

There is never a Jewish community without its scholars, but where Jews may not be both intellectuals and Jews, they prefer to remain Jews.

A proper autobiography is a death-bed confession.

A long past vividly remembered is like a heavy garment that clings to your limbs when you would run.

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.