Quotes from Glenn Kurtz

Everyone who gives up a serious childhood dream - of becoming an artist, a doctor, an engineer, an athlete - lives the rest of their life with a sense of loss, with nagging what ifs.

Of the approximately 2,900 Jewish Nasielskers who remained in Poland, fewer than ten survived the war.

gradually understood that I wasn't practicing to play the guitar, but playing the guitar to learn about practicing.

Interpreting literature was like performing a piece of music. It was a matter of lines and phrases, of hearing the resonance and learning where the stress falls. The note A has little significance by itself, just like the words love and yes. Yet placed just right, surrounded by other notes, other words, even a single tone can absorb all the forcefulness of our need, returning it to us as meaning.

Why do some details become "history"—included in schoolbooks, in scholarly dissertations, or in personal narratives—while other details are forgotten? What scale of information do we accept when we say that we know something about the past?