Quotes from Dara Horn

The line most often quoted from Frank's diary are her famous words, "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart." These words are "inspiring," by which we mean that they flatter us.

Here's how much some people dislike living Jews: they murdered 6 million of them.

Here's how much some people dislike living Jews: they murdered 6 million of them. This fact bears repeating, as it does not come up at all in Anne Frank's writing. Readers of her diary are aware that the author was murdered in a genocide, but this does not mean that her diary is a work about genocide. If it were, it is unlikely that it would have been anywhere near as universally embraced.

Maybe it's still worth it to me, even if it doesn't last forever," he said. "Maybe you're still worth it to me.

Because once you're born you might feel all of those things," Boris was saying. "In any order. And you can't control it." Daniel looked up, but Boris had turned away from him, his eyes staring at the ground. He held him tighter. "Maybe it will never happen," Boris said, and blinked. "I hope it never will. But if it does, I want you to be prepared.

But over four generations, the Soviet regime forced Jews to participate in and internalize their own humiliation—and in that way, Ala suggested, they destroyed far more souls. And they never, ever paid for it.

What makes the soul who it is, if not the choices the person makes while he's alive?

In fact, Sauvage believes that the reason Fry is so unknown is precisely because he reveals U.S. complicity in the Holocaust. "We live on two myths—that we didn't know, and that we couldn't do anything even if we did know," Sauvage said to me as soon as I sat down in his office. "This is the religion, and it isn't true. We knew plenty and could have done a lot.

Many days and years and people had passed before she understood that the details themselves were the still and sacred things, that there was nothing else, that the curtain of daily life itself was holy, that behind it was only a void.

Did you ever notice that when you read the same book again and again, the book doesn't change, but you do?

She didn't know exactly when she had first felt the sensation of regret. It was a physical sensation, a shudder that began deep in the stomach and traveled up through the throat; it was distinct from remorse, which one felt first in the throat and only later in the gut. Yet it was regret that she couldn't handle. She did anything she could to avoid it—including the initial bargain, the one that began everything. And now this one.

The bathroom was made of the finest materials, but underneath it all was nothing but shit.

Eventually Honi asked God to kill him, because he realized he had become superfluous. Which in fact was the entire purpose of life, to live in such a way that one made oneself superfluous. And therein lay the root of the problem. There was no point in any of it, none at all, unless one had plans to leave.

No one had any idea of how thick a layer of arbitrary conventions enshrouded a naked soul.

Harvard—a place, I slowly came to understand, that could teach me many things, including how to think, but that could not teach me goodness. Not because it taught the opposite, but because moral education is simply not what secular Western education or secular Western culture is for.

The freedoms that we cherish are meaningless without our commitments to one another: to civil discourse, to actively educating the next generation, to welcoming strangers, to loving our neighbors. The beginning of freedom is the beginning of responsibility.

That's the problem. We don't grow. We're like an old book, full of stories and also full of errors, and no one can completely understand us, even though many people try. But the problem is that we don't change. Only the people around us change.

Sometimes you can only have something you like for a short time, and after that you just have to be happy to have had it when you did, and enjoy the memory of it.

Then there were other reasons for living too, ones that mortals rarely thought of but that raged like fires in Rachel's mind: To correct mistakes. To avoid regret. To accept regret. To change. But none of these seemed possible either.

No one ever understands what happened with Adam and Eve. That story isn't about sex. It's about death. The forbidden desire isn't love or lust—you can get that stuff anytime down at the public bath, even on earth. The forbidden desire is immortality.

BIBLIOHOLIC

Either brave or stupid, Rachel thought. Of course, everything brave was also stupid. Sadly the same could not be said of the reverse.

The artwork is just the settings, or the other characters. You have to make the plot yourself.

EVERYBODY AROUND HERE likes to pave their roads with good intentions," the already-was Daniel muttered, "but those roads never seemed to get me anywhere. So I built this one out of stupid mistakes instead.