Inheritance 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.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“The people who are with us by either happenstance or design during life-altering events become woven into the fabric of those events.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“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.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“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.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“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?”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“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.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“Bessel van der Kolk: “The nature of trauma is that you have no recollection of it as a story.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“You carry the pain and you also carry the reward.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“Do you know the three great spiritual questions?" he asked..."Who am I?...Why am I here?...And how shall I live?”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“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.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“It is the nature of trauma that, when left untreated, it deepens over time.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“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.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“Always lists to be made, as if writing items in neat vertical rows might stave off randomness and chaos.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“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.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“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.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“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.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“But gratitude and trauma weren’t mutually exclusive.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“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.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and 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.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“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.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“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.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and 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.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“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.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“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.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“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.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“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.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“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.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“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.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“Either all of us are accidents of history or none of us are.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love