Breaking Bread with the Dead Quotes

“the first step in liquidating a people . . . is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.”
― Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

“Nothing’s over, ever.” And this is both a blessing and a curse. The past that ties us to people in ways that hurt us also ties us to people in ways that make healing possible. Sometimes we wish that the past could be over; sometimes we are grateful that it is not. It stands in the middle, “partially completed” but not over, poised between radical otherness and utter likeness. And that is why, as Weil says, “Our attachments and our passions do not so thickly obscure our discrimination of the eternal in the past.” We can see what really matters—“the eternal,” what always matters—because of that middle distance.”
― Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

“To read old books is to get an education in possibility for next to nothing.”
― Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

“When we look to the past ... what we are always looking for is whatever "is better than we are" ... The future cannot teach us because we are the ones who must imagine it.”
― Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

“We wanted tranquil minds. We wanted to escape our addiction to the adrenaline rush of connectivity. When Horace advises Lollius Maximus he also advises himself—indeed, the poem may do the latter more than the former. “Interrogate the writings of the wise,” he counsels. Asking them to tell you how you can Get through your life in a peaceable tranquil way. Will it be greed, that always feels poverty-stricken, That harasses and torments you all your days? Will it be hope and fear about trivial things, In anxious alternation in your mind? Where is it virtue comes from, is it from books? Or is it a gift from Nature that can’t be learned? What is the way to become a friend to yourself? What brings tranquility? What makes you care less? (I am using David Ferry’s marvelous translation.) Horace”
― Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

“By reading and considering the past, we cut through the thick, strong vines that bind our attention to the things of the moment, and our attention thereby becomes more free.”
― Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind