Inheritance Dani Shapiro Quotes

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land.

The people who are with us by either happenstance or design during life-altering events become woven into the fabric of those events.

There is in each of us a fundamental split between what we think we know and what we know but may never be able to think.

After listening to my entire story, he quietly said: "You can say, "This is impossible, terrible.' Or you can say, 'This is beautiful, wonderful.' You can imagine that you're in exile. Or you can imagine that you have more than one home.

Bessel van der Kolk: “The nature of trauma is that you have no recollection of it as a story.

You carry the pain and you also carry the reward.

I was beginning to see the danger in adhering to a single narrative, hewing to a story. The peril wasn't only in getting it wrong. It was a kind of calcification, a narrowing, a perversion of reality that hardened and stilled the spirit.

It is the nature of trauma that, when left untreated, it deepens over time.

It turns out that it is possible to live an entire life—even an examined life, to the degree that I had relentlessly examined mine—and still not know the truth of oneself.

Always lists to be made, as if writing items in neat vertical rows might stave off randomness and chaos.

Do you know the three great spiritual questions?" he asked..."Who am I?...Why am I here?...And how shall I live?

Throughout history, great philosophical minds have grappled with the nature of identity. What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?

I touched follow on my phone's screen. I saw it—a vision—two half sisters who had never known of one another's existence, sending the most modern version of a smoke signal, each from her own coast. I see you. I see you, too.

I don’t want to be a presentist,” the author was saying. Presentism: the anachronistic introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past.

What am I now that I was then? / May memory restore again and again / The smallest color of the smallest day; / Time is the school in which we learn, / Time is the fire in which we burn.

Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?

Christopher Bollas, writes: “There is in each of us a fundamental split between what we think we know and what we know but may never be able to think.

But gratitude and trauma weren’t mutually exclusive.

I tell my students, who are concerned with the question of betrayal, that when it comes to memoir, there is no such thing as absolute truth—only the truth that is singularly their own. I say this not to release them from responsibility but to illuminate the subjectivity of our inner lives. One person's experience is not another's.

Donating sperm was not the same as, say, donating a kidney. Or a retina. It was the passing along of an essence that was inseparable from personhood itself.

Either all of us are accidents of history or none of us are.

My newfound awareness was both gauntlet and gift. The choice wasn't to see it as one or the other. It was to embrace both.

You take something that isn’t your own and you breathe life into it. You create it—and it becomes your creation. You are an agent to help my brother express the finest kind of love.

What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are?

What never fail to draw me in, however, are secrets. Secrets within families. Secrets we keep out of shame, or self-protectiveness, or denial. Secrets and their corrosive power. Secrets we keep from one another in the name of love.

But I was at the threshold of understanding what Shirley had meant about my not being an accident of history. Or rather: either all of us are accidents of history or none of us are. One sperm, one egg, one moment. An interruption—a ringing phone, a knock on the door, a flashlight through the car window—a single second one way or the other and the result would be an entirely different human being. Mine was just more complicated, an accident involving vials, syringes, contracts, and secrets.

Knowing what you know, you're more of a daughter to Paul than you can possibly imagine. You take something that isn't your own and you breathe life into it. You create it—and it becomes your creation. You are an agent to help my brother express the finest kind of love.

One afternoon I opened an email from her that included a passage from the work of Pema Chodron, a Buddhist teacher and writer whom I had long admired. "To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land.

You have to judge things by the result," Shirley continued. "And the result in which you can exult is that the very best was combined in you: grace, brains, creativity, beauty. Whatever alien, mechanical, outside element was in the story—it was a story of success. You have such a rich endowment. You have been so recompensed. You carry the heightened sensitivity, to be sure. You carry the pain and you also carry the reward." Her voice—hoarse from speaking for hours—was a part of me. Her strong hands, her expressive forehead, her sweet smile—all a part of me, because she had always been a part of me. I had been so afraid that blood would be all that mattered.

I’m not giving you up,” she said. The thin shell holding me together cracked, and suddenly I was weeping with my whole body. “And you’d better not be giving me up,” she said. Every syllable, deliberate. “I’m not giving you up, Shirl,” I sobbed. “I was so afraid that—” “I have fewer years ahead of me than behind me,” she said. “And you are my brother’s daughter.

A: “Nobody Knows It but Me” is by ad copywriter Patrick O’Leary. Many readers asked for the text. Here it is: “There’s a place I travel when I want to roam, and nobody knows it but me. / The roads don’t go there and the signs stay home, and nobody knows it but me. / It’s far, far away and way, way afar. It’s over the moon and the sea / and wherever you’re going that’s wherever you are. / And nobody knows it but me.

What do we inherit, and how, and why? The relatively new field of epigenetics studies the impact of environment and experience on genes themselves. How much had the gene pool of the Waldens - that apparently cheerful extended family I had seen singing on YouTube - formed me? I did not come from the line of small, wiry, dark-eyed people of the shtetl, the men swaying over crumbling tombstones, prayer books in their hands. The imprint of pogroms, of the difficulties and sorrows of immigrant life was not mine - at least not in the physical sense. But I had carried these things a long way in my heart. I was of that dusty and doomed Polish village - and I was not. What had I inherited psychologically? What was in my blood? I was made of three people: my mother, my father, Ben Walden. Disparate worlds had been floating and colliding within me all my life.

late at night once

course, if you haven’t received

This is a work of nonfiction.

classically, naming a child is an opportunity for self-reflection.

What if I had always known that the reason I looked different and felt different was in fact because I was different? It would be easy to fantasize that this would have been better. But we can never know what lies at the heart of the path not taken.

secret wears away at a family until it is very nearly destroyed; parents with the best of intentions make selfish decisions affecting the fate of their child.

The nature of trauma is that you have no recollection of it as a story.

The nature of trauma,” van der Kolk had said, “is that you have no recollection of it as a story. The nature of traumatic experience is that the brain doesn’t allow a story to be created.

grief—particularly the phenomenon known as complicated grief—runs its own course in its own time.

you know the three great spiritual questions?” he asked. My eyes were closed, stinging from my disclosure, as they often did. “Who am I?” I whispered and paused. I couldn’t remember the other two. We were silent for a long moment. Outside his office, on the main street of Stockbridge, I could hear the whoosh of a passing car, the chirp of a lone bird. Finally, he continued. “Why am I here?” Tears ran down my temples and into my hair. He paused before offering me the last question. “And how shall I live?

WHEREVER I AM, I AM WHAT IS MISSING.

I clung to the only story I could tolerate.

Writers tend to be fetishistic about our materials, and I am no exception. Spiral-bound, perfect bound, lined, unlined, pocket-size - as if the notebook itself might make a difference. Instead, I ended up buying a package of index cards, understanding something I couldn't have articulated: my life was no in fragments I would need to shuffle and reshuffle in any attempt to make sense of it.

One person's experience is not another's. If five people in a family were to write the story of that family, we would end up with five very different stories. These are truths of a sort - the truth of adhering to what one remembers.

Students sometimes tell me. that they're waiting for someone to die before they feel they can write their story. They say this sheepishly, guiltily. As if, in some way, they're wishing for that person to expire, already, so they can get on with the business of writing about them. I try to liberate my students from those tortured thoughts by telling them that they may as well just start now, because it can be more difficult to write about the dead than to write about the living. The dead can't fight back. The dead have no voice. They can't say: But that isn't how it was. You're getting it wrong. They can't say: But I loved you so. They can't say: I had no idea.

What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?

The hidden disaster was secrecy, the pretense and magical thinking, the certainty that no one ever needed to know.

It is a measure of true adulthood that we are able to imagine our parents as the people they may have been before us.

Presentism: the anachronistic introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. It would

A psychoanalytic phrase—“unthought known”—became my instrument of illumination as I poked and prodded at my history with my parents. The psychoanalyst who coined it, Christopher

of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land.

The psychoanalyst who coined it, Christopher Bollas, writes: “There is in each of us a fundamental split between what we think we know and what we know but may never be able to think.

Two months passed, and I gave little thought to my DNA test. I was deep into revisions of my new book. Our son had just begun looking at colleges. Michael was working on a film project. I had all but forgotten it until one day an email containing my results appeared. We were puzzled by some of the findings. I say puzzled - a gentle word - because this is how it felt to me. According to Ancestry, my DNA was 52 percent Eastern European Ashkenazi. The rest was a smattering of French, Irish, English, and German. Odd, but I had nothing to compare it with. I wasn't disturbed. I wasn't confused, even though that percentage seemed very low considering that all my ancestors were Jews from Eastern Europe. I put the results aside and figured there must be a reasonable explanation tied up in migrations and conflicts many generations before me. Such was my certainty that I knew exactly where I came from.

If it wasn’t thought, it wasn’t so. If it wasn’t spoken, it hadn’t happened. Except that secrets, particularly the most deeply held ones, have a way of leaching into everything surrounding them.

Would it always matter? Lines from a Delmore Schwartz poem come to mind: “What am I now that I was then? / May memory restore again and again / The smallest color of the smallest

Sometimes people suggested that I must have an amazing memory—that surely I must recall so many scenes, moments, sensory details from my early years. But the truth is that I have a terrible memory. I struggled to access any of my childhood or even my teenage years. I had no recollection of it as a story. And so I followed my own line of words to see where it would lead me.

All my life I had known there was a secret. What I hadn’t known: the secret was me.

Except that secrets, particularly the most deeply held ones, have a way of leaching into everything surrounding them.

It would be easy to fantasize that this would have been better. But we can never know what lies at the end of the path not taken. Other difficulties, other heartaches, other complexities would certainly have emerged. But at least we would have been a family traversing them together.

Everybody is begotten and points backwards, deeper down in the depths of beginnings, the bottoms and abysses of the well of the past.