20 Quotes by Daniel Mendelsohn

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.

Taste is a mystery.

...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.

...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.

Authority could derive from passion, not pieces of paper.

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.

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.

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

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.