Home > Work > Happy New Year! and Other Stories
1 " Like they say: you stew up your troubles and eat a hearty meal. "
― Sholom Aleichem , Happy New Year! and Other Stories
2 " What eyes can tell you in a minute, a mouth will never say in a day. "
3 " That’s what I thought at the time. On second thought, perhaps I didn’t really think at all. "
4 " And lawyers are just like doctors. Whatever one says, the other says just the opposite. But they all take money and give advice. Each of them, different advice. "
5 " Words were made only for babblers, women, and lawyers. Like Bismarck once said: “Words were given to us to hide our thoughts. "
6 " We literally lawyered our heads off. Morning, noon, and night all we heard was lawyer, lawyer, lawyer. "
7 " When you get down to it, isn’t the truth better than alibis, flim-flam, or makeshift excuses? "
8 " A bank hates to rush —it takes its time. "
9 " If looks could kill—there would have been wholesale murder that day. "
10 " The Bible tells us to get along with our neighbor. So our commentator Rashi says—but if his dog barks, muzzle him. "
11 " I can’t stand looking at those nasty, smiling, yes-men. They’ll say yes to an August snowstorm and agree to fish growing on a cherry tree. If I run into someone like that, I just want to smear honey all over him and let the bees have a picnic. "
12 " I just want you to listen to what I have to say, for not every doctor likes to listen to his patients. "
13 " First of all, I’m over sixty. And second of all, I’m the sort of fellow to whom life and death are the same. "
14 " She’s not my first wife, you know, but my third. And a third wife, they say, is like the December sun. "
15 " I told them that Karl Marx was a theory and that theories change. Today it was this theory, tomorrow that one. But Tolstoi was a great artist and art remains forever. "
16 " It was a grief about which you could not, must not, dare not speak. "
17 " A receipt is as strong as a thatched roof. "
18 " Bit by bit they slipped back into their old strange talk. Maimonides, Yehuda Halevi’s Kuzari, Philosophy, Spinoza, and other such nonsense which went in one ear and out the other. "
19 " Shh, let me finish,” Mama said, and banged her elbow into my ribs. “Remember, now. Neither small nor tight. A roomy waist and a pleat. For God’s sake, a pleat. "
20 " When I tell a story, I tell it when I want to tell it, not when you want to hear it. "