Dara Horn Quotes & Sayings

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. — Dara Horn

I think all parents have a double life. — Dara Horn

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

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

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

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. — Dara Horn

Another remarkable thing about the dead is that they are all ages, preserved at every age you ever knew them, and at no age at all. — Dara Horn

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

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

I am much more aware of making the plot more original, avoiding contrivance, having the story matter much more. I used to think more about symbols consciously. Now I think much more about the story. — Dara Horn

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. — Dara Horn

...she smiled - and time was created. — Dara Horn

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. — Dara Horn

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. — Dara Horn

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. — Dara Horn

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

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. — Dara Horn

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

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. — Dara Horn

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. — Dara Horn

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

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. — Dara Horn

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

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. — Dara Horn

Daniel Ziskind had once learned that time is created through deeds of true kindness. Days and hours and years are not time, but merely vessels for it, and too often they are empty. The world stands still, timeless and empty, until an act of generosity changes it in an instant and sends it soaring through arcs of rich seasons, moment after spinning moment of racing beauty. And then, with a single unkind deed, a single withheld hand, time ceases to exist. — Dara Horn

Why are children so much smarter than adults? — Dara Horn

I wanted to explore the kinds of hope and doubt, faith and disappointment, that shape the next generation, whether consciously or not. I suppose, in all of my work, I'm always going back in time. — Dara Horn

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! — Dara Horn

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. — Dara Horn

I mean that we control the way we remember the past, and that's what matters in the present. We choose what is worthy of our memory. We should probably be grateful that we can't remember everything as God does, because if we did, we would find it impossible to forgive anyone. The limit of human memory encourages humility. — Dara Horn

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. — Dara Horn

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. — Dara Horn

Time itself is created through deeds of true kindness. — Dara Horn

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

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. — Dara Horn

My siblings and I had this theory that my parents were spies. — Dara Horn

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. — Dara Horn