David Ebershoff Quotes

I know someone loves me from how they say my name. Like with my mom and dad, when they say “Benjamin” it’s like my name is safe in their mouth.

We struggle throughout our lives to learn to accept the shell that transports us through this world, and many of us take great effort to change it. I believe everyone has at least once looked in the mirror and thought, ‘That is not me. I am someone else. The world cannot see me as I really am.’

‘The Danish Girl’ was published in 2000. Then it, too, would disappear, as most books do. It fell out of print almost everywhere. I wrote other books and, as an editor, worked on dozens more. Yet always, Lili stayed with me.

When I see someone interesting on the subway – the lady with her new Bible or the delivery guy holding down a dozen Mylar balloons – my mind goes in two different directions. Where are they coming from? And where are they going?

Last year when my grandma fell and broke her hip she couldn’t paint her toenails anymore. So my grandpa started doing it for her, even after he fell and broke his hip, too. For me, that’s love.

Marriage fascinates me: how we negotiate its span, how we change within it, how it changes itself, and why some relationships survive and others do not. There isn’t a single marriage that couldn’t provide enough narrative arc for a novel.

We are born, we live, we disappear. One of the chilling aspects of history is the swiftness with which it carries us into oblivion.

An artist sees that which does not yet exist. He or she imagines a future others cannot perceive. The artist – and the writer – reshapes reality so that it becomes even more vivid and lasting.

Isn’t it interesting what a stranger can offer? A little wisdom, a little mercy, a little love.

I always love novels that open up a subject to me – like raising a window to a beautiful, mysterious world outside.

The soles of the best writers, a professor once told me, are worn down to holes. This is an incomplete measure, but the image of a writer grinding his or her shoes against curbs and cobblestones stuck with me. The story is always out there, the details around the corner or down the alley.

Even the most meticulous historians work subjectively. The historian’s point of view, his or her selection of subject and sources, the emphasis, the tone – all of these lead to subjective history, inevitably so. I do not say this as a criticism, merely as an observation.

I’m not the kind of writer that can write eight hours a day… I’m the kind of writer that the more time I have, the less efficient I am.

Sometimes when I travel, I like to close my eyes and imagine visiting during another era.

I love to read history; at its best, it is an art.