Dara Horn Quotes

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.

It was possible, probable even, that the world could be rebuilt.

No one is anything more than a cloud that vanishes, and the best anyone could hope for was not to be the last.

Before being born, his mother explained, babies go to school. Not a school like Boris's, but a different kind of school, where all the teachers are angels. The angels teach each baby the entire Torah, along with all of the secrets of the universe. Then, just before each baby is born, an angel puts its finger right below the baby's nose - here she paused to put her finger across his lips (could he see the blood under her skin, or did he only imagine it?) - and whispers to the child: Shh - don't tell. And then the baby forgets. "Why does he have to forget?" Boris had asked, moving his lips beneath her finger. He didn't want to know, not really. But his mother's back had stiffened, and he could feel that she might get up at any moment, put out the light, walk away, disappear. She pulled her hand away from his face, resting it on her own stomach. "So that for the rest of his life," she said, "he will always have to pay attention to the world, and to everything that happens in it, to try to remember all the things he's forgotten.

Why are children so much smarter than adults?

Good books leave an impression. Great books forever alter the way you think about what it means to be alive. You Disappear is not just a well-told story, but a dramatic recalibrating of what it means to have a mind-and a soul.

Or worse, he could be born perfect, and then, through some error she would never perceive, grow up and destroy someone else's life
for there are thousands of ways to destroy someone's life, Sara knew, but to improve someone's life, there are so few, so few!

His dreams contained no stories at all, but only the hard stones of thoughts: the unimaginably unlikely coincidence of being alive at the same time as the love of your life, the frequency with which a person was expected to bear the body and the burden of someone else, the idiocy of thinking that kindness can protect the person who is kind, and worst of all, the bottomless pit of truth that he had suddenly, sickeningly seen: that the world to come was not an afterlife at all, but simply this world, to come- the future world, your own future, that you were creating for yourself with every choice you made in it.

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.

There is a moment that has happened over and over again, in every place children have ever slept, on every dark night for the past ten thousand years, that almost everyone who was once a child will forever remember. It happens when you are being tucked into bed, on a dark and frightened night when the sounds of the nighttime outside are drowned out only by the far more frightening sounds in your head. You have already gone to bed, have tried to go to bed, but because of whatever sounds you hear in your head you have failed to go to bed, and someone much older than you, someone so old that you cannot even imagine yourself becoming that old, has come to sit beside you and make sure you fall asleep. But the moment that everyone who was once a child will remember is not the story the unfathomably old person tells you, or the lullaby he sings for you, but rather the moment right after the story or song has ended. You are lying there with your eyes closed, not sleeping just yet but noticing that the sounds inside your head seem to have vanished, and you know, through closed eyes, that the person beside you thinks that you are asleep and is simply watching you. In that fraction of an instant between when that person stops singing and when that person decides to rise from the bed and disappear -- a tiny rehearsal, though you do not know it yet, of what will eventually happen for good -- time holds still, and you can feel, through closed eyes, how that person, watching your still, sma

The wicked will run to the iron bridge, but it will collapse under their weight. The righteous will cross the paper bridge, and it will support them all. Paper is the only eternal bridge. Your purpose as a writer is to achieve one task, and one task only: to build a paper bridge to the world to come.

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

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.

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

The way I express ideas is through the plot, Suspense is an important part of expressing an idea.

In that fraction of an instant between when that person stops singing and when that person decides to rise from the bed and disappear-a tiny rehearsal, though you do not yet know it, of what will eventually happen for good-time holds still, and you can feel, through your closed eyes, how that person, watching your still, small face in the darkness, has suddenly realized that you are the reason his life matters.

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

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.

I believe that when people die, they go to the same place as all the people who haven't yet been born. That's why it's called the world to come, because that's where they make the new souls for the future. And the reward when good people die" – her mother paused, swallowed, paused again – "the reward when good people die is that they get to help make the people in their families who haven't been born yet. They pick out what kinds of traits they want the new people to have – they give them all the raw material of their souls, like their talents and their brains and their potential. Of course it's up to the new ones, once they're born, what they'll use and what they won't, but that's what everyone who dies is doing, I think. They get to decide what kind of people the new ones might be able to become.

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

It had been a long time, perhaps years, since she had heard a man apologize

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

School is a terrible place, I have decided. There is nothing good about it except for math class. Everything else is a total waste of time. As I mentioned before I have done a lot of reading about prisons, and I notice that they always describe them as painted in very dull colors, and my school is also painted in these kinds of colors, with greenish lockers and brownish walls and grayish floors. Actually they recently fixed up one wing of the school, and now that part of the school is just the opposite - all the colors are really bright, with bright red and yellow lockers and blue doors and shiny white floors that are already all scuffed up. It's funny because I thought the other colors were terrible but these are much worse, because they make it seem like it's normal to be happy there when it isn't.

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.

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.

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.

Do you think I'm deaf?" the deaf beggar asked. "I'm not deaf at all. It's just that it isn't worth hearing a whole world full of people complaining about what they lack." He told the story of a wealthy country where people believed they were living 'the good life.' The country had a garden of riches, of so many sights and smells and sounds that the people in the country literally lost their senses, spoiled by everything they had already seen and heard and smelled and tasted and touched, until the beggar taught them how to use their senses again.

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.

...she smiled - and time was created.

And the reward when good people die" - her mother paused, swallowed, paused again - "the reward when good people die is that they get to help make the people in their families who haven't been born yet. They pick out what kinds of traits they want the new people to have - they give them all the raw material of their souls, like their talents and their brains and their potential. Of course it's up to the new ones, once they're born, what they'll use and what they won't but that's what everyone who dies is doing, I think.

His unfinished book had become his obsession. He rarely left his room, which he insulated with sheaves of paper scribbled with beginnings and endings, nailing ideas to the walls and stretching long strips of sentences from the window to the door. Tall stacks of scenes and chapters sprouted from the floor, as if the papers had reincarnated themselves back into trees. The paper forest around him glimmered in the sun from the windows, weaving rays of light in yellow and purple and blue. Hunger squeezed his throat, but he turned his ravenousness toward writing. He almost never slept. During the shortages, he wrote between the columns of old newspapers, or on pieces of cardboard, or on bark pulled from trees. He traded potatoes for ink.

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

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.