Quotes from Daniel Mendelsohn

complain and share certain stories—for instance, the one that Mrs. Wilk eventually confided to my mother about how, yes, she and the other Polish girls of her town, Rzeszów, had been taught to hate the Jews, but they didn't know any better—and also would gossip about the pani, the rich neighbor ladies who did not share their meals with their cleaning ladies; after this time, during which the two women

Authority could derive from passion, not pieces of paper.

Taste is a mystery.

Anna Bergman in Private Confessions], unlike her mother... has never been able to tame her fantasies of what life ought to be like, to adapt the role she yearns to enact to the play she finds herself in.

But a son, although he is of his father, cannot know his father totally, because the father precedes him; his father has always already lived so much more than the son has, so that the son can never catch up, can never know everything. No wonder the Greeks thought that few sons are the equals of their fathers; that most fall short, all too few surpass them. It's not about value; it's about knowledge.

But which is the true self? the Odyssey asks, and how many selves might a man have? As I learned the year my father took my Odyssey course and we retraced the journeys of its hero, the answers can be surprising.

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

known, was from there, a detail that moved and impressed me—and had posted photographs of the town on ShtetlLinks. I'd e-mailed her to say how much I'd enjoyed her postings, and we began a correspondence, during which

the fact that both of these hostile camps could make use of the same examples to prove diametrically opposed interpretations suggests a truth about how all of us read and interpret literary texts—one that is, possibly, rooted in the mysteries of human nature itself. Where some people see chaos and incoherence, others will find sense and symmetry and wholeness.

Essere vivi significa avere qualcosa da raccontare. Vuol dire essere l'eroe, il protagonista di una vicenda. Quando si diventa un personaggio marginale nella narrazione di qualcun altro, allora si è davvero morti.

The Oriental (-Turkish) name Stamboul is a corruption of Islam = "true belief" and bul = "a mass or abundance.

can't imagine when she wanted to evoke some positive, pleasant memory of her past, as if there were no point in trying to use more concrete, more descriptive adjectives

to gawk, for the entire apartment had been turned into a private archive, a museum of an extinct culture, in which Feuer himself had assembled whatever fragments of Striy's lost Jewish life he could get his hands on: old prayer books, maps, yellowing documents, municipal surveys, photographs of people he knew