He always made a point of mentioning that he was reading the Odyssey on his iPad. Books are an obsolete technology! he’d say. Get with the times. Homer on an iPad, now that’s an adventure.

We all need narrative to make sense of the world.

There are many ways to lose your relatives, I thought; war is only one of them.

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

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.

To be alive is to have a story to tell.

Something in her had been broken... The ones who were killed were not the only ones who’d been lost.

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.

Few sons are the equals of their fathers; most fall short, all too few surpass them.” –.

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