Happy New Year! and Other Stories Quotes

“Like they say: you stew up your troubles and eat a hearty meal.”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“What eyes can tell you in a minute, a mouth will never say in a day.”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“Words were made only for babblers, women, and lawyers. Like Bismarck once said: “Words were given to us to hide our thoughts.”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“That’s what I thought at the time. On second thought, perhaps I didn’t really think at all.”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“A bank hates to rush —it takes its time.”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“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.”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“It was a grief about which you could not, must not, dare not speak.”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“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.”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“She’s not my first wife, you know, but my third. And a third wife, they say, is like the December sun.”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“The Bible tells us to get along with our neighbor. So our commentator Rashi says—but if his dog barks, muzzle him.”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“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.”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“If looks could kill—there would have been wholesale murder that day.”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“A receipt is as strong as a thatched roof.”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“When you get down to it, isn’t the truth better than alibis, flim-flam, or makeshift excuses?”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“We literally lawyered our heads off. Morning, noon, and night all we heard was lawyer, lawyer, lawyer.”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“Lawyers and doctors were created for the specific purpose of contradicting each other. Whatever one says, the other must say just the opposite. They’re just like the Aramaic translation of the Bible.”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“Hello.” “Hello yourself. Where you from?” “From hunger!”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“Like they say: suffer with your own. You get the picture? But complete strangers? Must I bear the brunt of their troubles? Have I deserved a fate like that? What wrong have I done?”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“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.”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“We both loved each other. But we never spoke of it. Kept it to ourselves. So passed our best years.”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“You’ll ask: how can people understand one another without talking? Well that shows that you really know psychology. But not people!”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“When I tell a story, I tell it when I want to tell it, not when you want to hear it.”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“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.”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“If I get hold of a book and see that the sun shone, the moon floated by, the air was fragrant, the birds tweeted—I fling it across the room.”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“After all, we’re blessed with doctors. I brought him two doctors. So they argued with each other. One said operate, the other said don’t. Meanwhile, the patient died.”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“You can be friendly with someone without being friends. And you can be close friends without being friendly. Anyway, that’s my opinion. I’m not asking you what you think.”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“You’re just a young doctor! Where do you come off having a waiting line? If you continue this way, you hear, you’re going to have troubles, not a practice.”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“I prescribed silver-chloride,” he said. “Silver-chloride! So why are you skipping around like an idiot from one doctor to another?”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“He’s so butter-soft you can apply him to a third-degree burn.”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories

“I’m a miller—unfortunately—I own a mill. That is, the mill owns me, for you know what they say. Once you’re dragged into it, you’re finished.”
― Sholem Aleichem, Happy New Year! and Other Stories