David Ebershoff Quotations

I thought, 'Someone will write an amazing book about this,' but I didn't think I could, ... I'd never been to Denmark in my life. I thought the book was beyond me. But it stuck with me and six months later, I went back to it and thought, 'I have to try!'

The agony of martyrdom is almost too much to bear. In the early hours, when the loss is fresh, there is no comfort in knowing Glory will live on. We speak of the martyrs in History but we cannot know the actual pain they suffered in their final living hours. They enter the realm of the mythic, but we must never forget these were men like ourselves. When their flesh is torn, they cry out. They suffer as you or I would suffer, although more bravely. Remember Christ. Although I am now an enemy to Joseph's legacy, I shudder when recalling his pain.

Isn't it interesting what a stranger can offer? A little wisdom, a little mercy, a little love.

I must say a few words about memory. It is full of holes. If you were to lay it out upon a table, it would resemble a scrap of lace. I am a lover of history . . . [but] history has one flaw. It is a subjective art, no less so than poetry or music. . . . The historian writes a truth. The memoirist writes a truth. The novelist writes a truth. And so on. My mother, we both know, wrote a truth in The 19th Wife– a truth that corresponded to her memory and desires. It is not the truth, certainly not. But a truth, yes . . . Her book is a fact. It remains so, even if it is snowflaked with holes.

I trust you have seen the ocean. If you have, then you have witnessed the divine. How barren the ground is in comparison! If I could count the hours I have spent staring out at it! And yet those hours never feel lost. I cannot imagine how else I could refill them were I given a second chance.

I know someone loves me from how they say my name. Like with my mom and dad, when they say "Benjamin" it's like my name is safe in their mouth.

Last year when my grandma fell and broke her hip she couldn't paint her toenails anymore. So my grandpa started doing it for her, even after he fell and broke his hip, too. For me, that's love.

What type of woman would stay with her husband through this? ... She was a woman who would do anything to help her marriage survive. She wanted to help her husband finally become happy, though ultimately that would destroy her marriage.

People sometimes ask me why I wrote this as a novel instead of as a nonfiction book, ... It's because the terrain that I'm exploring, the emotions, aren't documented, as is the case in most marriages. The private thoughts aren't known and that's what I wanted to pursue here. I took it to my imagination and to the skills of fiction writing in order to write about this marriage.

Everyone at some time or another has looked into the mirror and thought, 'That's not who I am. The world sees me differently than I see myself,'