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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“The pompous son of a bitch knows everything—it’s too bad he doesn’t know anything else.”
You had to be there to see what it looked like. They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare.”
“It means turning our back on our friends. It means making friends with their enemies. You know what it means, son? It means destroying everything that America stands for.”
“Because what’s history?” he asked rhetorically when he was in his expansive dinnertime instructional mode. “History is everything that happens everywhere. Even here in Newark. Even here on Summit Avenue. Even what happens in his house to an ordinary man—that’ll be history too someday.”
He’d tell us that in a democracy, keeping abreast of current events was a citizen’s most important duty and that you could never start too early to be informed about the news of the day.
There were two types of strong men: those like Uncle Monty and Abe Steinheim, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play.
It’s so heartbreaking, violence, when it’s in a house—like seeing the clothes in a tree after an explosion. You may be prepared to see death but not the clothes in the tree.
