Quotes from Dara Horn

The books are like children in that having written one doesn't make writing the next one any easier, because it's a new set of problems and a new set of challenges with each one, and having dealt with one before means that you now know how to do it.

Memory as an article of faith often comes naturally to writers, who by temperament are likely to be diarists and record keepers, forever searching past events for elusive patterns - and forever believing that such patterns are to be found.

Commanded by God dozens of times in the Hebrew Bible to remember their past, Jews historically obeyed not by recording events but by ritually re-enacting them: by understanding the present through the lens of the past.

Every person has a legacy. You may not know what your impact is, and it may not be something that you can write on your tombstone, but every person has an impact on this world.

Sibling relationships figure in a lot of my books. You don't often see relationships between adult siblings explored in fiction.

Love your fellow, and not just those who agree with you.

I have another aspect of my career where I'm a scholar of Yiddish and Hebrew literature, and I'll say that when you study Yiddish literature, you know a whole lot about forgotten writers. Most of the books on my shelves were literally saved from the garbage. I am sort of very aware of what it means to be a forgotten artist in that sense.

I'm a person who always wanted to turn my life into an archive. Social media made my dream come true.

My siblings and I had this theory that my parents were spies.

Children are often envied for their supposed imaginations, but the truth is that adults imagine things far more than children do. Most adults wander the world deliberately blind, living only inside their heads, in their fantasies, in their memories and worries, oblivious to the present, only aware of the past or future.

Time itself is created through deeds of true kindness.

she smiled - and time was created.

What one finds in Jewish storytelling, though, is something really different: a kind of realism that comes from humility, from the knowledge that one cannot be true to the human experience while pretending to make sense of the world.

The insane conspiracy theories that motivate people who commit antisemitic violence reflect a fear of real freedom: a fondness for tyrants, an aversion to ideas unlike their own, and most of all, a casting-off of responsibility for complicated problems. None of this is a coincidence.

Judaism has always been uncool, going back to its origins as the planet's only monotheism, featuring a bossy and unsexy invisible God. Uncoolness is pretty much Judaism's brand, which is why cool people find it so threatening

Destruction and humiliation didn't matter. Only memory and integrity did. Was the hour I was living through right now different from the hour they were living through then? Did it matter? From what hour does one recite the evening Sh'ma?

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. Our night of vigil has already begun.

There's no such thing as a problem that's yours and not mine.

I mean that we control the way we remember the past, and that's what matters in the present. We choose what is worthy of our memory. We should probably be grateful that we can't remember everything as God does, because if we did, we would find it impossible to forgive anyone. The limit of human memory encourages humility.

between the raindrops - a Hebrew expression for evading repeated disaster.

Ben, everything is going to get better, he heard her say in the void. Really. It has to get better, because it can't get worse. Ben opened his eyes with a jolt, staring at himself in the mirror. That's not true, he suddenly thought. It can definitely get worse. As he nodded at Sara and pretended to smile, he understood that it was the first intelligent thought he had ever had.

Most of the other visitors were chained to their audio guides, looking only at what their little headsets told them was worth seeing.

But there is also something inherently shameful in the rescuer-rescued relationship - the humiliation of being reduced to depending on another person for survival - and that shame expresses itself and resentment toward rescuers… Gratitude is what makes you hate someone.

Daniel Ziskind had once learned that time is created through deeds of true kindness. Days and hours and years are not time, but merely vessels for it, and too often they are empty. The world stands still, timeless and empty, until an act of generosity changes it in an instant and sends it soaring through arcs of rich seasons, moment after spinning moment of racing beauty. And then, with a single unkind deed, a single withheld hand, time ceases to exist.