Quotes from Bruce Feiler

Take a walk with a turtle. And behold the world in pause.

Tired of nagging your kids to hurry up, get dressed, drink their milk and brush their teeth? Here's a radical idea: Don't.

Celebrate your family's bleakest moments and how your relatives overcame them. In doing so, you will encounter darkness, but you'll give your children the confidence that they, too, shall overcome.

Here's a confession: I hate parenting books. I hate the ones that are earnest and repetitive.

One of the core ideas of the Bible is that meaning can be found in history. The sheer act of telling and retelling stories helps us to understand God's role in the world as well as our own position in a long line of ancestors who have wrestled with similar issues to the ones we wrestle with every day.

Every writer dreams of writing a book that will touch people.

All couples have been told to schedule regular one-on-one time. 'Date night' is the default answer to most problems in modern marriages. And research backs this up.

I was so naive about writing, I went to the public library and checked out the only volume they had on the topic - an academic treatise about publishing from the WWII era.

I grew up as a fifth-generation Jew in the American South, at the confluence of two great storytelling traditions. After graduating from Yale in the 1980s, I moved to Japan. For young adventure seekers like myself, the white-hot Japanese miracle held a similar appeal as Russia in 1920s or Paris in the 1950s.

If you tell your own story to your children - that includes your positive moments and your negative moments, and how you overcame them - you give your children the skills and the confidence they need to feel like they can overcome some hardship that they've felt.

The biggest idea that I have learned - I basically went in to write a book about Adam and Eve, ended up writing a book about love. And what did I learn? Love is a story you tell with another person.

After college, I wanted to learned about myself as an American, so I left the United States and went to Japan.

I say the same thing that I've said for decades now, which is: don't go over to Japan trying to change it, thinking that you know better. Go there trying to understand.

I'd say my best memory was climbing Mt. Fuji, and the worst memory was... trying to fit my feet into the free giveaway slippers at Japanese schools.

May your first word be adventure and last word love.

The number of disruptors a person can expect to experience in an adult life is around three dozen. That's an average of one every twelve to eighteen months.

We all need to be the hero of our own story.

The Starrs came up with a modified three questions for their family meeting. 1. What things went well in our family this week? 2. What things could we improve in our family? 3. What things will you commit to working on this week?

and you will have many opportunities to take in human civilization at its highest levels of achievement. ..approach this experience as a small child might approach a mud puddle. You can lean over and look at yourself in the reflection, maybe stick a finger in it, an cause a little ripple. Or you can dive in, thrash around, and find out what it feels like, what it tastes like... I urge you to jump in. And I look forward to seeing you, back here, at the end of this experience, covered in mud.

By picking their own punishments, children become more internally driven to avoid them. By choosing their own rewards, children become more intrinsically motivated to achieve them. Let your kids take a greater role in raising themselves.

My definition: A transition is a vital period of adjustment, creativity, and rebirth that helps one find meaning after a major life disruption. But how do you enter this mysterious state? Does it happen inevitably or do you somehow have to decide? And if so, how do you do that?

But humans disappoint. Adam, in tasting the fruit, indicates that he prefers Eve to God, so God banishes them.

Every story, the moment it's written down, will be reread," she said. "And every rereading will be a reinterpretation. In that sense, there is not an original story and there is not an original message.

Life is the story you tell yourself. But how you tell that story—are you a hero, victim, lover, warrior, caretaker, believer—matters a great deal. How you adapt that story—how you revise, rethink, and rewrite your personal narrative as things change, lurch, or go wrong in your life—matters even more.