Mary Antin Quotes (30 Quotes)

My days in the slums were pregnant with possibilities it only needed the ripeness of events to make them fruit forth in rcalities.

You went up to be examined with the other Jewish children, your heart heavy about that matter of your nose.

If education, culture, the higher life were shining things to be worshiped from afar, he had still a means left whereby he could draw one step nearer to them.

It is only that my illusion is more real to me than reality. And so do we often build our world on an error, and cry out that the universe is falling to pieces, if any one but lift a finger to replace the error by truth.

The first meal was an object lesson of much variety. My father produced several kinds of food, ready to eat, without any cooking, from little tin cans that had printing all over them.

But most of the Gentiles were ignorant.

It is not that I belong to the past, but the past that belongs to me.

Steadily as I worked to win America, America advanced to lie at my feet. I was an heir, on Dover Street, awaiting maturity. I was a princess waiting to be led to the throne.

The Gentiles used to wonder at us because we cared so much about religious things about food and Sabbath and teaching the children Hebrew.

First, you had to have a tutor at home, who prepared you and talked all the time about the examination you would have to pass, till you were scared.

Such creatures of accident are we, liable to a thousand deaths before we are born. But once we are here, we may create our own world, if we choose.

A characteristic thing about the aspiring immigrant is the fact that he is not content to progress alone. Solitary success is imperfect success in his eyes. He must take his family with him as he rises.

A long past vividly remembered is like a heavy garment that clings to your limbs when you would run.

One positive command he gave us: You shall love and honor your emperor. In every congregation a prayer must be said for the czar's health, or the chief of police would close the synagogue.

Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth.

We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later; and the birth and growth of the spirit, in those who are attentive to their own inner life, are slow and exceedingly painful.

There is never a Jewish community without its scholars, but where Jews may not be both intellectuals and Jews, they prefer to remain Jews.

No, the czar did not want us in the schools.

There was one public school for boys, and one for girls, but Jewish children were admitted in limited numbers - only ten to a hundred; and even the lucky ones had their troubles.

As we moved along in a little procession, I was delighted with the illumination of the streets. So many lamps, and they burned until morning, my father said, and so people did not need to carry lanterns.

You heard on all sides that the brightest Jewish children were turned down if the examining officers did not like the turn of their noses.

The Wandering Jew in me seeks forgetfulness. I am not afraid to live on and on, if only I do not have to remember too much.

His struggle for a bare living left him no time to take advantage of the public evening school. In time he learned to read, to follow a conversation or lecture; but he never learned to write correctly; and his pronunciation remains extremely foreign to this day.

On a royal birthday every house must fly a flag, or the owner would be dragged to a police station and be fined twenty-five rubles.

The apex of my civic pride and personal contentment was reached on the bright September morning when I entered the public school.

There was one thing, however, the Gentiles always understood, and that was money. They would take any kind of bribe, at any time. They expected it.

The czar always got his dues, no matter if it ruined a family.

The czar was always sending us commands - you shall not do this and you shall not do that - till there was very little left that we might do, except pay tribute and die.

In the evening of the first day my father conducted us to the public baths.

My friendships, my advantages and disadvantages, my gifts, my habits, my ambitions these were the materials out of which I built my after life, in the open workshop of America.