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
book mirrors use
We use books like mirrors, gazing into them only to discover ourselves.
book people soul
I am afraid I am one of those people who continues to read in the hope of sometime discovering in a book a single—and singular—piece of wisdom so penetrating, so soul stirring, so utterly applicable to my own life as to make all the bad books I have read seem well worth the countless hours spent on them. My guess is that this wisdom, if it ever arrives, will do so in the form of a generalization.
We know the ideal isn't where the action is.
beer connected football male rest suppose
I suppose it's because beer is connected to football broadcasts and the rest of it. Beer . . . accompanies male activities.
bad good superior talk time
If superior talk is your idea of a good time it's (hell) not really such a bad place to end up
secret way speaking-french
By the way, the secret of speaking French is confidence. Whether you are right or wrong, you don't hesitate.
reading small-numbers people
While reading writers of great formulatory power — Henry James, Santayana, Proust — I find I can scarcely get through a page without having to stop to record some lapidary sentence. Reading Henry James, for example, I have muttered to myself, "C’mon, Henry, turn down the brilliance a notch, so I can get some reading done." I may be one of a very small number of people who have developed writer’s cramp while reading.
inspirational adrift realms
Within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live.
two lunch phones
I know how many days in which I have just answered e-mail, had three phone calls and a two hour lunch. Poof, gone. They are not infrequent.
sloth knows know-how
I know how deeply slothful I am.
mistake genius sometimes
If geniuses can sometimes make mistakes, cannot the rest of us on occasion be geniuses?
inspirational dream man-of-my-dreams
What distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, and what we do to make them come about.
regret wife terrible
My wife who is non-Jewish regrets it all the time that I can say these terrible things about fellow Jews and she can't
people musical training
I just know so many people who have six or seven foreign languages and have read everything and have musical training and they are still dorks