Quotes from Daniel Mendelsohn

The writers we absorb when we're young bind us to them, sometimes lightly, sometimes with iron. In time, the bonds fall away, but if you look very closely you can sometimes make out the pale white groove of a faded scar, or the telltale chalky red of old rust.

At night, I think about these things. I'm pleased with what I know, but now I think much more about everything I could have known, which was so much more than anything I can learn now and which now is gone forever.

that the holocaust is so big, the scale of it is so gigantic, so enormous that it becomes easy to think of it as something mechanical. Anonymous. But everything that happened, happened because someone made a decision to pull a trigger, to flip a switch, to close a cattle door, to hide, to betray.

Few sons are the equals of their fathers; most fall short, all too few surpass them." —

I like to see things through the lens of Greek tragedy, which teaches us, among other things, that real tragedy is never a straightforward confrontation between Good and Evil, but is rather much more exquisitely and much more agonizingly, a conflict between two irreconcilable views of the world.

I had traveled far, had circled the planet and studied my Torah, and at the very end of my search I was standing, finally, in the place where everything begins: the tree in the garden, the tree of knowledge that, as I learned long ago, is something divided, something that because growth occurs only through the medium of time, brings both pleasure and, finally, sorrow.

Our parents are mysterious to us in ways that we can never quite be mysteries to them.

To be alive is to have a story to tell.

There are many ways to lose your relatives, I thought; war is only one of them.

real tragedy is never a straightforward confrontation between Good and Evil, but is, rather, much more exquisitely and much more agonizingly, a conflict between two irreconcilable views of the world.

To be alive today is to have a story to tell. To be alive is precisely to be the hero, the center of a life story. When you can be nothing more than a minor character in somebody else's tale, it means that you are truly dead.

An epic without a focus - without a single action, a coherent plot, a single terrible point to make - was just a very long poem.

sunt lacrimae rerum, "There are tears in things.

And so the picture that I showed her that Sunday, a picture I'd seen countless times since I was a boy, brought home to me for the first time the strangeness of my relationship to the people I was interviewing, people who were rich in memories but poor in keepsakes, whereas I was so rich in the keepsakes but had no memories to go with them.

Something in her had been broken... The ones who were killed were not the only ones who'd been lost.

We all need narrative to make sense of the world.

beauty and pleasure are at the center of teaching. For the best teacher is the one who wants you to find meaning in the things that have given him pleasure, too, so that the appreciation of their beauty will outlive him. In this way—because it arises from an acceptance of the inevitability of death—good teaching is like good parenting.

The father knows the son whole, but the son can never know the father.

He always made a point of mentioning that he was reading the Odyssey on his iPad. Books are an obsolete technology! he'd say. Get with the times. Homer on an iPad, now that's an adventure.

and what he knows and we know (Odysseus), the poet introduces an important theme that will continue to grow throughout his poem, which is: What is the difference between who we are and what others know about us? This tension between anonymity and identity will be a

were to die, even if one's brother or darling son should be killed before one's eyes. The drug is called nepenthê, which means "no grief," the penthê in nepenthê deriving from the noun penthos, "grief." It is, indeed, a word formed much the same way that anodyne, "without pain," the word that points to the origins

In Brueghel's hands, Ovid's tale of a son's willful rejection of his father's wisdom becomes a story about the need for a kind of humility—for, you might say, perspective; an admonition about what we miss when we are intent on our own narratives, about the dangers of mistaking the foreground for the whole picture.

It is, indeed, in this light that Capote's famous characterization of In Cold Blood as "a reflection on American life—this collision between the desperate, ruthless, wandering, savage part of American life, and the other, which is insular and safe," takes on its proper meaning.T

The three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic.