Daniel Mendelsohn Quotes

#1. 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.

Daniel Mendelsohn

#2. Closeness can lead to emotions other than love. It's the ones who have been too intimate with you, lived in too close quarters, seen too much of your pain or envy or, perhaps more than anything, your shame, who, at the crucial moment, can be too easy to cut out, to exile, to expel, to kill off.

Daniel Mendelsohn

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

Daniel Mendelsohn

#4. ...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.

Daniel Mendelsohn

#5. the Holocaust wasn't something that simply happened, but is an event that's still happening.)

Daniel Mendelsohn

#6. Authority could derive from passion, not pieces of paper.

Daniel Mendelsohn

#7. 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.

Daniel Mendelsohn

#8. To be alive is to have a story to tell.

Daniel Mendelsohn

#9. 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.

Daniel Mendelsohn

#10. Taste is a mystery.

Daniel Mendelsohn

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

Daniel Mendelsohn

#12. ...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.

Daniel Mendelsohn

#13. sunt lacrimae rerum, "There are tears in things.

Daniel Mendelsohn