Heidi Slowinski

If you are a follower of my Bookstagram feed, then you know that I regularly feature inspirational literary quotes in my posts and captions, mostly from Jewish Writers. I’ve compiled a list of sixty-eight of my favorite quotes, all by Jewish writers. Whether you need quotes for your Instagram or just need some inspiration, I hope you enjoy!

• Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.
• I shall always remember that smile. From what world did it come from?
• Whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story. That is his duty.

• Kindness, I’ve discovered, is everything in life.
• Night is a time of rigor, but also of mercy. There are truths which, one can see only when it’s dark.
• When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.

• When a shy person smiles, it’s like the sun coming out.
• Of all life’s pleasures, only love owes no debt to death
• You should always be kind to people, Ava. You never know what sorrows they’re carrying around.

• Two people who are true friends are like two bodies with one soul.
• No one knows he is fortunate until he becomes unfortunate, that’s the way the world is.
• Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.

• Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up.
• He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach – that is makes no sense.
• How easy life is when it’s easy and how hard when it’s hard.

• A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
• Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.
• A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.

• Our finger prints don’t fade from the lives we touch.
• Not everything has to have a point. Some things just are.
• A person without curiosity may as well be dead.

• He was going to live forever, or die in the attempt.
• He knew everything there was to know about literature, except how to enjoy it.
• I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long.

• So long as I have questions to which there are no answers, I shall go on writing.
• I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.
• The world’s continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.

• Writers talk about the agony of writing: I talk about the agony of writing.
• Work is hard. Distractions are plentiful. And time is short.
• I rewrite everything, almost idiotically. I rewrite and work and work, and rewrite and rewrite some more.

• I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.
• It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.
• If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

• If you ask me what I want, I’ll tell you. I want everything.
• Dreams are manifestations of identities.
• Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.

• May it always cost the head as long as it does not cost the heart.
• Everything one believes in begins to exist.
• What one takes can never be gifted.

• It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else.
• Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?
• Dreams have only one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely.

• Life is full of surprises. Why is that always surprising?
• But Fin would always be a bit of a romantic, at least when it came to books.
• Empiricism and philosophy itself are both sensuous and sensual. The desire to know is desire.

• To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination.
• We take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
• The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.

• Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.
• Writing is what Ido. It’s like breathing to me at a certain point, but if I couldn’t write, I do like cooking.
• I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are.

• Every day silence harvests its victims. Silence is a mortal illness.
• What we must remember above all in the education of our children is that their love of life should never weaken.
• But after a certain point in life a person has to dunk her regrets in the morning coffee, just like biscuits.

• The most valuable commodity in business today, if people would only recognize it, is enthusiasm.
• She was beginning to have that feeling that comes after midnight, of one’s thoughts opening out, flowering, groping out loud for some new discovery, some new truth that is really as old as all the hundreds of years girls have been confiding to one another in the relaxing intimacy of the night.
• It was funny, she was thinking, how something that had seemed sentimental and important, and even more – almost sacred – could turn into nothing at all.

• Everyone has talent. What’s rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads.
• Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.
• Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man.

• It always gives me a shiver when I see a cat seeing what I can’t see.
• Love has no uttermost, as the stars have no number and the sea no rest.
• I want to be good…I try to be good, I do try, and to like everybody. But there are some people – some people I can’t like, however much I try. I hate them – there!

• Being an old maid is like death by drowning, a really delightful sensation after you cease to struggle.
• Whoever said love conquers all was a fool. Because almost everything conquers love – or tries to.

• Don’t be humble… you’re not that great.
• To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don’t be.
• One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.