The apex of my civic pride and personal contentment was reached on the bright September morning when I entered the public school.

A proper autobiography is a death-bed confession.

[I began to unload] the pyramid of honors, civic and literary, which had been heaped on me by the headlong process of rewarding a popular success. One day, I sat down and wrote a wholesale lot of letters of resignation. When I finished, I didn't belong to a single authors club or patriotic society. I was myself again, whatever that was.

It is not that I belong to the past, but the past that belongs to 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 long past vividly remembered is like a heavy garment that clings to your limbs when you would run.

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