Dara Horn
Dara Horn
Dara Hornis an American novelist and professor of literature...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
CountryUnited States of America
running bridges iron
The wicked will run to the iron bridge, but it will collapse under their weight. The righteous will cross the paper bridge, and it will support them all. Paper is the only eternal bridge. Your purpose as a writer is to achieve one task, and one task only: to build a paper bridge to the world to come.
mother thinking people
And the reward when good people die - her mother paused, swallowed, paused again - the reward when good people die is that they get to help make the people in their families who haven't been born yet. They pick out what kinds of traits they want the new people to have - they give them all the raw material of their souls, like their talents and their brains and their potential. Of course it's up to the new ones, once they're born, what they'll use and what they won't but that's what everyone who dies is doing, I think.
love-you agree fellows
Love your fellow, and not just those who agree with you.
kindness deeds
Time itself is created through deeds of true kindness.
book mean thinking
Good books leave an impression. Great books forever alter the way you think about what it means to be alive. You Disappear is not just a well-told story, but a dramatic recalibrating of what it means to have a mind-and a soul.
children memories past
Children are often envied for their supposed imaginations, but the truth is that adults imagine things far more than children do. Most adults wander the world deliberately blind, living only inside their heads, in their fantasies, in their memories and worries, oblivious to the present, only aware of the past or future.
Every person has a legacy. You may not know what your impact is, and it may not be something that you can write on your tombstone, but every person has an impact on this world.
among believers days fact fiction forbidden happens haunted lives objective offer passes turned writers written
Writers and believers live their lives haunted by the same question: What happens to our days once they disappear? The objective fact is that each day that passes is lost forever, as forbidden to us as the dead. But prayer and fiction offer a different answer. Those lost days still live among us, written in each person's hand, turned into stories.
aspect aware books forgotten hebrew literally means saved scholar shelves sort study
I have another aspect of my career where I'm a scholar of Yiddish and Hebrew literature, and I'll say that when you study Yiddish literature, you know a whole lot about forgotten writers. Most of the books on my shelves were literally saved from the garbage. I am sort of very aware of what it means to be a forgotten artist in that sense.
adult explored figure relationships
Sibling relationships figure in a lot of my books. You don't often see relationships between adult siblings explored in fiction.
article believing elusive events faith forever likely naturally patterns record searching
Memory as an article of faith often comes naturally to writers, who by temperament are likely to be diarists and record keepers, forever searching past events for elusive patterns - and forever believing that such patterns are to be found.
theory
My siblings and I had this theory that my parents were spies.
dozens events god hebrew jews lens obeyed present recording remember understanding
Commanded by God dozens of times in the Hebrew Bible to remember their past, Jews historically obeyed not by recording events but by ritually re-enacting them: by understanding the present through the lens of the past.
life social turn
I'm a person who always wanted to turn my life into an archive. Social media made my dream come true.