Inheritance Quotes

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

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

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

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

“I clung to the only story I could tolerate.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

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

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

“grief—particularly the phenomenon known as complicated grief—runs its own course in its own time.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

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

“WHEREVER I AM, I AM WHAT IS MISSING.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“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

“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

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

“It is a measure of true adulthood that we are able to imagine our parents as the people they may have been before us.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“The hidden disaster was secrecy, the pretense and magical thinking, the certainty that no one ever needed to know.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

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

“Presentism: the anachronistic introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. It would”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

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

“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

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

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

“Except that secrets, particularly the most deeply held ones, have a way of leaching into everything surrounding them.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“Everybody is begotten and points backwards, deeper down in the depths of beginnings, the bottoms and abysses of the well of the past.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

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

“All my life I had known there was a secret. What I hadn’t known: the secret was me.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

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

“course, if you haven’t received”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“late at night once”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“This is a work of nonfiction.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love