Joseph Epstein
Joseph Epstein
Joseph Epstein, also known as Colonel Gilles and as Joseph Andrej, was a Polish-born Jewish communist activist and a French Resistance leader during World War II. He was executed by the Germans...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth9 January 1937
CountryUnited States of America
Joseph Epstein quotes about
book mirrors use
We use books like mirrors, gazing into them only to discover ourselves.
teacher teaching satisfaction
What all great teachers appear to have in common is love of their subject, an obvious satisfaction in rousing this love in their students, and an ability to convince them that what they are being taught is deadly serious
reading mean thoughtful
Culture means, I think, that you have widened your experience enough through reading and through being a little bit thoughtful about these things that it has changed your outlook in some ways. And not necessarily made you a better human being but made you see things.
reality broken life-is
The reason 'closure' is a cliche is that it is used too often, too imprecisely, and doesn't in any case reflect reality. In reality, such closure in broken friendships and much else in life is rarely achieved; only death brings closure and then not always for those still living.
writing thinking discovery
For me writing is foremost a mode of thinking and when it works well, an act of discovery
bears pounds literature
Someone — Cyril Connolly? Ezra Pound? — once said that anything that can be read twice is literature; I would say that anything that bears saying twice is quotable.
class style may
The decisive moment in the defeat of upper class, capital-S, Society may have come when, in newspapers all over the nation, what used to be call the Society page was replaced by the Style section.
married
I am married to someone I love.
waiting conversation application
The best joke-tellers are those who have the patience to wait for conversation to come around to the point where the jokes in their repertoire have application.
breathing-space aggravation absence
What, really, is wanted from a neighborhood? Convenience, certainly, an absence of major aggravation, to be sure. But perhaps mostof all, ideally, what is wanted is a comfortable background, a breathing space of intermission between the intensities of private life and the calculations of public life.
safe boring chiefs
Generalization, especially risky generalization, is one of the chief methods by which knowledge proceeds... Safe generalizations are usually rather boring. Delete that "usually rather." Safe generalizations are quite boring.
trust never-quit
Always seek the general and never quite trust it.
distance giving looks
I know from the middle distance I give off the look of being prolific, which is a funny compliment to receive.
fashion real hunting
Political correctness and so many of the political fashions of the day...could only be perpetrated in adolescent minds: minds, that is, that are trained to search out one thing and one thing only...Only an adolescent would find it worthwhile to devote his or her attention chiefly to the hunting of offenses, the possibility of slights, real and imagined.