Jenna Blum Quotes

When I lived in Minneapolis in my twenties, and my mom lived there, too, I used to take her 'storm chasing' - by which I mean I'd see a pulsing blob of radar on The Weather Channel and make her drive us toward the storm.

For one of the odd things about death, Trudy has discovered, is that in its wake one must go about business as usual; it seems heartless and wrong, but now that the rituals of mourning have been attended to, the sole task left to Trudy is to try and comprehend the enormity of thes sudden change.

Yes, Charles is a genius, and he loves his manias. But Charles's disorder is the gift nobody wants to be given. There is no cure for it, no solution. Either Charles takes his medications and suffers, or he doesn't and everyone else does. It is colossally, sickeningly, definitively unfair.

My novella, 'The Lucky One,' is inspired in part by my dad and also by a Holocaust survivor I interviewed for the Steven Spielberg Survivors of the Shoah Foundation.

I've been fascinated with severe weather since I was four, when I saw a tornado at night in my mom and grandmother's southeast Minnesota hometown while everyone else was asleep - an experience I encoded in 'The Stormchasers.'

There is, of course, no way of knowing for certain. There is no way to know what they felt, those millions who were given no chance at survival. I can only speculate. And even I, a Jew - yes, I am a Jew, Dr. Swenson, and my entire family was murdered by the Nazis - even I can only imagine a pale facsimile of what it must have been like. But I do know that there is no justification. No possible rationalization for what the Nazis did, for what civilian Germans permitted and encouraged to happen.

They change my brain. So in essence, what you're saying I should do is compromise my very self, my understanding and feeling of who I am, to conform to what you want. Is that it?

We are all ashamed in one way or another. Who among us is not stained by the past?

Time will fold over the past if you let it.

From this vantage point in the summer, the countryside below is a dreaming checkerboard over which it seems that one could, with a running start, spread one's arms and fly.

Reality is subjective, don't you know that by now? It's how we experience the world that makes it real to us.

My dad, Bob Blum, used to dash across Grand Central's main terminal catwalk several times daily as a young CBS correspondent, running copy from newsroom to studio and back - because CBS' first broadcasts were from Grand Central Terminal. The pictures on people's television sets used to shake when the trains came in!

I have people in my family with bipolar disorder, and for years I've watched them struggle with the disorder's extreme moods and often devastating consequences.

How warm the day can be when the wind is at your back.

Heimat. The word mean home in German, the place where one was born. But the term also conveys a subtler nuance, a certain tenderness. One's Heimat is not merely a matter of geography; it is where one's heart lies.

Nothing is ever quite right, is it, after a parent dies? No matter how well things go, something always feels slightly off ...

The past is past. And better it remain so.

How many times have I heard you Whirlwind guys say that even now, after all these years of research, nobody knows why one supercell spawns a tornado and another doesn't? Why wouldn't that be the case for people too? Every brain is different and responds differently to treatment, and what might not help one person, for instance holistic medicine, might help the next.

Life is so often unfair and painful and love is hard to find and you have to take it whenever and wherever you can get it, no matter how brief it is or how it ends.

But I'm going to prove there's a link between storms that rapid-cycle and ones that produce tornadoes because I'm a rapid cycler myself.