An Odyssey Quotes

“beauty and pleasure are at the center of teaching. For the best teacher is the one who wants you to find meaning in the things that have given him pleasure, too, so that the appreciation of their beauty will outlive him. In this way—because it arises from an acceptance of the inevitability of death—good teaching is like good parenting.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“Our parents are mysterious to us in ways that we can never quite be mysteries to them.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“Few sons are the equals of their fathers; most fall short, all too few surpass them.” —”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“But a son, although he is of his father, cannot know his father totally, because the father precedes him; his father has always already lived so much more than the son has, so that the son can never catch up, can never know everything. No wonder the Greeks thought that few sons are the equals of their fathers; that most fall short, all too few surpass them. It’s not about value; it’s about knowledge.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“But which is the true self? the Odyssey asks, and how many selves might a man have? As I learned the year my father took my Odyssey course and we retraced the journeys of its hero, the answers can be surprising.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“We all need narrative to make sense of the world.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“The father knows the son whole, but the son can never know the father.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“examples of what are called nostos narratives. Nostos is the Greek word for “homecoming”; the plural form of this word, nostoi, was, in fact, the title of a lost epic devoted to the homecomings of the Greek kings and chieftains who fought in the Trojan War. The Odyssey itself is a nostos narrative, one that often digresses from its tale of Odysseus’ twisty voyage back to Ithaca in order to relate, in brief, the nostoi of other characters, as Nestor does here—almost as if it were anxious that those other nostoi stories would not themselves make it safely into the future. In time, this wistful word nostos, rooted so deeply in the Odyssey’s themes, was eventually combined with another word in Greek’s vast vocabulary of pain, algos, to give us an elegantly simple way to talk about the bittersweet feeling we sometimes have for a special kind of troubling longing. Literally this word means “the pain associated with longing for home,” but as we know, “home,” particularly as we get older, can be a time as well as a place. The word is “nostalgia.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“and what he knows and we know (Odysseus), the poet introduces an important theme that will continue to grow throughout his poem, which is: What is the difference between who we are and what others know about us? This tension between anonymity and identity will be a”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“He always made a point of mentioning that he was reading the Odyssey on his iPad. Books are an obsolete technology! he’d say. Get with the times. Homer on an iPad, now that’s an adventure.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“Un padre hace a su hijo de su propia carne y de su propia mente, y luego lo moldea según sus ambiciones y sus sueños, sus fallos y sus crueldades también. Pero el hijo, aunque es de su padre, no puede conocer totalmente a su padre, porque este lo precede. Su padre siempre ha vivido ya mucho más que el hijo; tanto, que el hijo nunca puede alcanzarlo, nunca puede saberlo todo".”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“Nunca lo oí decirle “Te quiero” -ni a ella ni a ninguno de nosotros, por cierto-. Esto último se lo comenté en cierta ocasión, y él me dijo: “Mira, qué quieres que te diga, no es lo mío”; lo cual explica, seguramente, que yo ponga tanto empeño en decirles esas palabras a mis hijos, al final de cada conversación telefónica, correo electrónico o nota escrita, quizá porque los hijos nos acabamos convirtiendo en los padres que habríamos deseado tener…”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“A varios alumnos les hizo gracia la cosa, pero a mí volvió a impresionarme lo arraigada que estaba en él la noción de que el mundo es muy duro, la amarga satisfacción con que contaba la historia de algún “débil” destrozado por la vida, el destino o la mala suerte. Yo sabía que la dureza del mundo era lo que para él justificaba su propia justicia, siempre tan dura: la inflexible aplicación a sí mismo, a sus amigos, a nosotros, de unas severas normas de honradez y de rendimiento intelectual. Tenías que querer ser duro. Si el mundo no acepta las medias tintas, ¿por qué has de hacerlo tú?”.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“Por supuesto que no debemos olvidar nuestro destino, sea cual sea, nos advierte el anónimo narrador; pero queda claro que el significado de la vida se desprende de nuestro caminar por ella y de lo que obtenemos caminando”.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“Los hijos siempre dan por supuesto que la verdadera personalidad de sus padres es la de ser padre; pero ¿por qué?. ¿Quién conoce de veras su propio linaje?, se pregunta amargamente Telémaco muy al principio de la Odisea. Y sí: quién conoce su propio linaje. Nuestros padres son misteriosos para nosotros de un modo en que nosotros nunca podremos serlo para ellos”.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“De este modo, la Odisea promulga lo verdadero de uno de sus más famosos e inquietantes versos: “Pocos hijos son iguales a sus padres; casi todos son peores y solo unos pocos los superan”.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“El propósito de estos amplios símiles es hacer la acción ficticia más presente, más vívidamente reconocible a las realidades familiares de nuestras monótonas existencias -labrar la tierra, pescar, cocinar-, permitir que los oyentes descansen del mundo del poema, tan despiadadamente violento y tan ajeno a veces”.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“Now that I’m old, he said presently, I guess I can see the part about the importance of being out there and trying things even if you fail. You have to keep moving, at least. The worst thing is to go stale. Once that happens, you’re finished.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“canciones del interior: Where or When, música de Richard Rodgers y letra de Lorenz Hart, © 1937 Chappel & Co., WB Music Corp. y Williamson Music Co., derechos gestionados por WB Music Corp. o/b/o Estate of Lorenz Hart y Family Trust u/w Richard Rodgers y Family Trust u/w Dorothy F. Rodgers I Didn’t Know What Time It Was, música de Richard Rodgers y letra de Lorenz Hart, © 1939 Chappel & Co., WB Music Corp. y Williamson Music Co., derechos gestionados por WB Music Corp. o/b/o Estate of Lorenz Hart y Family Trust u/w Richard Rodgers y Family Trust u/w Dorothy F. Rodgers My Funny Valentine, música de Richard Rodgers y letra de Lorenz Hart, © 1937 Chappel & Co., Derechos gestionados por WB Music Corp. y Williamson Music Co., derechos gestionados por WB Music Corp. o/b/o Estate of Lorenz Hart y Family Trust u/w Richard Rodgers y Family Trust u/w Dorothy F. Rodgers. Publicado de acuerdo con Alfred Publishing, LLC y Williamson Music”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, Una Odisea: Un padre, un hijo, una epopeya (Los Tres Mundos)

“One of the strange things about teaching is that you can never know what your effect will be on others; can never know, if you have something to teach, who your real students will be, the ones who will take what you have to give and make it their own—“what you have to give” being, in no small part, what you yourself learned from some other teacher, someone who wondered whether you would absorb what she had to give, someone who is, by the time you’re old enough to write about the experience, as old as your parents, perhaps even dead—can never really know which of the young people clustered around the seminar table is someone whom the teacher or the text has touched so deeply, for whatever reason, that the lesson will live beyond the classroom, beyond you.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“the fact that both of these hostile camps could make use of the same examples to prove diametrically opposed interpretations suggests a truth about how all of us read and interpret literary texts—one that is, possibly, rooted in the mysteries of human nature itself. Where some people see chaos and incoherence, others will find sense and symmetry and wholeness.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“In Brueghel’s hands, Ovid’s tale of a son’s willful rejection of his father’s wisdom becomes a story about the need for a kind of humility—for, you might say, perspective; an admonition about what we miss when we are intent on our own narratives, about the dangers of mistaking the foreground for the whole picture.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“Our parents are mysterious to us in ways that we can never quite be mysterious to them.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“were to die, even if one’s brother or darling son should be killed before one’s eyes. The drug is called nepenthê, which means “no grief,” the penthê in nepenthê deriving from the noun penthos, “grief.” It is, indeed, a word formed much the same way that anodyne, “without pain,” the word that points to the origins”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic