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O Quotes

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All O Quotes

“On my 70th birthday, I was asked how I felt about mankind's prospects. This is my reply: We are behaving like yeasts in a brewer's vat, multiplying mindlessly while greedily consuming the substance of a finite world. If we continue to imitate the yeasts, we will perish as they perish, having exhausted our resources and poisoned ourselves in the lethal brew of our own wastes. Unlike the yeasts, we have a choice. What will it be?”

“On my arrival at Tokyo, I rushed into her house swinging my valise, before going to a hotel, with "Hello, Kiyo, I'm back!" "How good of you to return so soon!" she cried and hot tears streamed down her cheeks. I was overjoyed, and declared that I would not go to the country any more but would start housekeeping with Kiyo in Tokyo. Some time afterward, some one helped me to a job as assistant engineer at the tram car office. The salary was 25 yen a month, and the house rent six. Although the house had not a magnificent front entrance, Kiyo seemed quite satisfied, but, I am sorry to say, she was a victim of pneumonia and died in February this year. On the day preceding her death, she asked me to bedside, and said, "Please, Master Darling, if Kiyo is dead, bury me in the temple yard of Master Darling. I will be glad to wait in the grave for my Master Darling." So Kiyo's grave is in the Yogen temple at Kobinata.”

“On my arrival in U.S.S.R. in 1934, I remember that I was struck by the enormous proportion of Jewish functionaries everywhere. In the Press, and diplomatic circles, it was difficult to find non-Jews...In France many believe, even amongst the Communists, that, thanks to the present anti-Jewish purge...Russia is no longer Israel's chosen land...Those who think that are making a mistake.”

“On my bedside table is a snow globe with a winterscape inside. Church, park bench, girl standing shin-deep in snow. Tip the snow globe over and a blizzard of slow snow falls over church and bench and girl. What is it about snow globes that makes them fascinating and terrifying at once? My heart lurches at the thought of the snow-globe girl waiting endlessly, with only the hope of a new snow blizzard to settle on her mantle when the next person tips her snow-globe world over. Not a gust of breeze may ruffle her skirt, not a bird may perch atop the steeple. The only way out of a snow globe is by shattering the glass dome that is its sky.”

“On my desk is an appeal from the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. It asks me to become a sponsor and donor of this soon-to-be-opened institution, while an accompanying leaflet has enticing photographs of Bob Dylan, Betty Friedan, Sandy Koufax, Irving Berlin, Estee Lauder, Barbra Streisand, Albert Einstein, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. There is something faintly kitsch about this, as there is in the habit of those Jewish papers that annually list Jewish prize-winners from the Nobel to the Oscars. (It is apparently true that the London Jewish Chronicle once reported the result of a footrace under the headline 'Goldstein Fifteenth.') However, I think I may send a contribution. Other small 'races' have come from unpromising and hazardous beginnings to achieve great things—no Roman would have believed that the brutish inhabitants of the British Isles could ever amount to much—and other small 'races,' too, like Gypsies and Armenians, have outlived determined attempts to eradicate and exterminate them. But there is something about the persistence, both of the Jews and their persecutors, that does seem to merit a museum of its own.”

“On my drive from Salt Lake City to Moab, Utah, I passed an eighteen-wheeler with mud flaps on the rear tires. The flaps were black and featured the silver silhouette of a very statuesque naked woman. I’m sure you’ve seen this artistic expression in your travels. I wondered: has this ploy ever worked, like some kind of perverted fishing lure?”

“On my first day in London I made an early start. Reaching the Public Record Office not much after ten, I soon secured the papers I needed for my research and settled in my place. I became, as is the way of the scholar, so deeply absorbed as to lose all consciousness of my surroundings or of the passage of time. When at last I came to myself, it was almost eleven and I was quite exhausted: I knew I could not prudently continue without refreshment.”

“On my first night there, I sat on the bad during the twilight while the walls went slowly from gray to gold to black, listening to a soprano's voice climb dizzily up and down somewhere at the other end of the hall until at last the light was completely gone, and the faraway soprano spiraled on and on in the darkness like some angel of death, and I can't remember the air even seeming as high and cold and rarefied as it was that night, or ever feeling farther away from the low-slung lines of dusty Piano.”