Jenna Blum Quotations

When I lived in Minneapolis in my twenties, and my mom lived there, too, I used to take her 'storm chasing' - by which I mean I'd see a pulsing blob of radar on The Weather Channel and make her drive us toward the storm.

My dad, Bob Blum, used to dash across Grand Central's main terminal catwalk several times daily as a young CBS correspondent, running copy from newsroom to studio and back - because CBS' first broadcasts were from Grand Central Terminal. The pictures on people's television sets used to shake when the trains came in!

Grub Street Writers is the reason I've stayed in Boston. I started teaching for Grub back in 1997, when founder Eve Bridburg, a Boston University M.A. alumna, as I am, kindly gave me my first job out of grad school.

My novella, 'The Lucky One,' is inspired in part by my dad and also by a Holocaust survivor I interviewed for the Steven Spielberg Survivors of the Shoah Foundation.

I've been fascinated with severe weather since I was four, when I saw a tornado at night in my mom and grandmother's southeast Minnesota hometown while everyone else was asleep - an experience I encoded in 'The Stormchasers.'

I have people in my family with bipolar disorder, and for years I've watched them struggle with the disorder's extreme moods and often devastating consequences.

She can never tell him what she started to say: that we come to love those who save us. For although Anna does believe this is true, the word that stuck in her throat was not save but shame.

We are all ashamed in one way or another. Who among us is not stained by the past?

Heimat. The word mean home in German, the place where one was born. But the term also conveys a subtler nuance, a certain tenderness. One's Heimat is not merely a matter of geography; it is where one's heart lies.

Life is so often unfair and painful and love is hard to find and you have to take it whenever and wherever you can get it, no matter how brief it is or how it ends.

How could she tell him that we come to love those who save us?

Nothing is ever quite right, is it, after a parent dies? No matter how well things go, something always feels slightly off...

'The Lucky One' features a young concentration camp survivor named Peter Rashkin - who's about the age my dad was when he started at CBS - working at the Oyster Bar, trying to acclimate to his new country and outrun the memories of the daily he left behind.