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Quote by Daniel Mendelsohn

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The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

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Author

Daniel Mendelsohn
Daniel Mendelsohn

Daniel Mendelsohn is an American memoirist known for his profound self-reflection and insightful exploration of history. His works often intertwine personal experiences with broader historical contexts. more

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“I’m not sure what made me think God would choose to reveal himself to little ol’ me. I think I believed that if I pleaded often and hard enough, he would see how sincere I was and grant my request, kind of like Linus and the Great Pumpkin. My sincerity would win him over so he would choose my pumpkin patch -- or, in this case, my bedroom -- to make a brief personal appearance. Unfortunately, that never happened.”

“Stories weren't just make believe, all Dr. Seuss and Mother Goose. I saw a circle: first life, then death. Spring, summer, fall, winter. Blue sky and storms and quilts of cold clouds occupy the same space but at different times. Memories and stories help you rebuild. Things most precious to you may be gone, lost to the wicked wind, but you remember what had been, and you move on.”

“And soon all the people who had accompanied me through life would be gone, too, and then even the people who had known us, and no one would remain on earth who had ever seen us, and those descended from us perhaps would know stories about us, perhaps once in a while they would pass by buildings where where we had lived and they would mention that we had lived there. And then the stories would fade, and our graves would go untended, and no one would guess what it had been like to wake before dawn in our breath-warmed bedrooms as the radiators clanked and our wives and husbands and children slept. And we would move from the nearer regions of the dead who are remembered into the farther regions of he forgotten, an on past those, into a space as while and big as the sky replicated forever.”

“My dad takes most of the pictures in our family, and he makes scrapbooks. This means he gets to figure out what's important for us to remember... I guess my mom could make a scrapbook, but she doesn't. And I could do it and so could my brothers, but then we would need extra pictures. Plus we're just kids and we don't have time for that. I know the scrapbooks we'd make would be different from Dad's. But the person who does the work gets to write the history.”