Daniel Menaker > Quotes

“On our flight back from Arizona where we adopted our daughter three years after our ungreen one-headed son a stewardess ... paused to to adore the little girl my wife was holding. The woman was very attractive and seemed happy and easy with herself - confident enough to say to my wife 'Well congratulations and my don't you look terrific too.' My wife said 'Well we've just adopted her.' And the stewardess said 'How wonderful Congratulations again I was adopted too.' Happily the enthusiastic remark was not lost on our three-year-old boy nor was it lost on him that in Pheonix we had stayed in a close to luxurious resort hotel. He didn't know or care about the dreary heavy rain that fell in Atlanta when he came into our lives - all he knew about adoption at this point really was that it involved a warm whirpool tub cornucopian buffet breakfasts and a fascinating differently private-partsed baby.”
― Daniel Menaker

“His main example was to read like a child--very curiously and carefully ... But with the full intellectual sophistication of a brilliant adult.”
― Daniel Menaker, My Mistake: A Memoir

“Do you want justice--do you want to SHOW THEM--or do you want to achieve your goal? ... In business, for people who want to and have the skill to "get ahead," seeking justice in tough situations leads to failure time and time again.”
― Daniel Menaker, My Mistake: A Memoir

“[He] embodies this tension between civilization and its discontents, between the longing for a rational and cultured life and the bad luck and regrets and emotional anarchy that sabotage it.”
― Daniel Menaker, My Mistake: A Memoir

“Not seeking acknowledgment for things done well but finding satisfaction in doing them well.”
― Daniel Menaker, My Mistake: A Memoir

“God--if by God the agnostic means precision, clarity, genuine feeling, accuracy--is in the details only when the writer (or speaker, for that matter) knows himself and exactly what he is doing: rare.”
― Daniel Menaker, My Mistake: A Memoir

“Publishing, I learn later, is a little like the garment industry: You have to be geographically well placed, in New York, for schmoozing convenience.”
― Daniel Menaker, My Mistake: A Memoir

“I know very few people who have grown all the way up. The best most of us can do is manage intermittent maturity.”
― Daniel Menaker, My Mistake: A Memoir

“The world, with all its impossible variegation and the basic miracle of its existence, draws most mourners out of their grief and back into itself. The homosexual forsythia blooms; the young Irish dancers in Killarney dance, their arms as rigid as shovel handles; secret deals are done involving weapons or office space or crude oil or used cars or drugs; new lovers, believing they will never really have to get up, lie down together; the Large Hadron Collider smashes the Higgs boson into view; snow drapes its white stoles on the bare limbs of winter; the crack of the bat swung by a hefty Dominican pulls a crowd to its feet in Boston; bricks for the new hospital in Phnom Penh are laid in true courses; the single-engine Cessna lands safely in an Ohio alfalfa field during a storm. How can you resist? The true loss in only to the dying, and even the won't feel it when the dying's done.”
― Daniel Menaker, My Mistake: A Memoir

“How much did I miss, out of haste, intensity, and anger? How much would I come to wish that I had learned about a quieter kind of effort and persistence earlier on, about winning for myself instead of proving myself to, or against, others?”
― Daniel Menaker, My Mistake: A Memoir

“It would be more honest than this Olympian distance you maintain.”
― Daniel Menaker, The Treatment

“Really good 'hard' novels — say, Wolf Hall— yield, if you read them carefully, the information you need when you need it, in order to follow their paths. But there is a point at which subtle storytelling maneuvers outmaneuver their own intelligibility.”
― Daniel Menaker