Bruce Feiler Quotes

I grew up as a fifth-generation Jew in the American South, at the confluence of two great storytelling traditions. After graduating from Yale in the 1980s, I moved to Japan. For young adventure seekers like myself, the white-hot Japanese miracle held a similar appeal as Russia in 1920s or Paris in the 1950s.

Learning to heal ruptures is a key to having a successful relationship. Adam and Eve model that for all of us. In Hollywood love is a choice, and you live happily ever after. In real life love is a series of choices. You make the choice to be with a person over and over again.

Social media is fine, but we need to put the phones down and look somebody in the eye. Talk to your neighbor. Talk to your community. Especially talk to the one you love. It's all about connection. It's hard, but it's ultimately what gives us meaning in the world.

Decades of research have shown that most happy families communicate effectively. But talking doesn't mean simply 'talking through problems,' as important as that is. Talking also means telling a positive story about yourselves.

I'm a fifth generation Jew from the South, and I would say that I felt this connection to my religion, but it wasn't a spiritual connection.

Our instinct as parents is to order our kids around — it's easier, and frankly, we're usually right. [But] reverse the waterfall as much as possible. Enlist the children in their own upbringing.

We no longer just take religious identity from our parents, so what's going on? Why are people going to this series, why are people reading so many books about religion? It's because they want answers. The answers are no longer just passed down from generation to generation. It's harder for people. In effect, you have to roll up your sleeve and ask the questions. But if you do it, if you forge your own identity, it can be much more personal and much more meaningful to you.

Americans know more about religion than almost any other topic.

I had always believed that I left a bit of me wherever I went. I also believed that I took a bit of every place with me.

After college, I wanted to learned about myself as an American, so I left the United States and went to Japan.

The key idea of agile is that teams essentially manage themselves. ... It works in software, and it turns out that it works with kids.

Take a walk with a turtle. And behold the world in pause.

The bottom line: if you want a happier family, create, refine and retell the story of your family's positive moments and your ability to bounce back from the difficult ones. That act alone may increase the odds that your family will thrive for many generations to come.

The higher the joy is not the light, it's the reflection. The greater pleasure is not climbing up; it's handing down

Tired of nagging your kids to hurry up, get dressed, drink their milk and brush their teeth? Here's a radical idea: Don't.

Cancer is a passport to intimacy. It is an invitation, maybe even a mandate, to enter the most vital arenas of human life, the most sensitive and the most frightening, the ones that we never want to go to - but when we do go there, we feel incredibly transformed.

You don't need a grand plan, you don't need to go back to the ancestors and rewrite the rules. You just need to take small steps and accumulate small wins.

Moses is our true founding father.

Knowing more about family history is the single biggest predictor of a child's emotional well-being. Grandparents can play a special role in this process, too.

The bottom line: If you want a happier family, bring those skeletons out of the closet.

The biggest idea that I have learned - I basically went in to write a book about Adam and Eve, ended up writing a book about love. And what did I learn? Love is a story you tell with another person.

But humans disappoint. Adam, in tasting the fruit, indicates that he prefers Eve to God, so God banishes them.

My name is Bruce Feiler, and I'm an explainaholic. I first heard this word used to describe Isaac Asimov, and I knew instantly that I suffered from the same condition. It's the incurable desire to tell, shape, share, occasionally exaggerate, often elongate, and inevitably bungle a good story.

Adam and Eve - and especially Eve - are victims of the greatest character assassination the world has ever known. Eve is not secondary. Eve, if anything, is the great initiator in the story. She's the first independent woman. For me, rediscovering that Eve was the greatest bad**s women of all time was a revelation.

You may be frustrated with religion, but don't take that out on God.

Every writer dreams of writing a book that will touch people.

We're in a hyper-connected world, and there's a crisis of connection. The first thing that God says about woman and man in the Bible is that it's not right for humans to be alone. Social media interaction cannot take the place of face-to-face interaction. If anything, it prevents us from doing that. We're staring into our screens for so long that we're forgetting to look at the people directly in front of us.

When I was growing up, I, like many Jews, cheered what appeared to be the receding of faith from everyday life. The further religion got from our lives the better our lives would get, I thought, because persecution had been such a burden to Jewish families for generations.

I'd say my best memory was climbing Mt. Fuji, and the worst memory was... trying to fit my feet into the free giveaway slippers at Japanese schools.

Here's a confession: I hate parenting books. I hate the ones that are earnest and repetitive.

One of the things I've learned is to be much more open about my frailties and about our failures, because when you show your kids how you can resolve conflict in your life in real time, you're giving them confidence that when they have conflicts, they can push through them.

I was so naive about writing, I went to the public library and checked out the only volume they had on the topic - an academic treatise about publishing from the WWII era.

Fathers can find great inspiration in faith.

Children who plan their own goals, set weekly schedules, evaluate their own work build up their frontal cortex and take more control over their lives.

It's like they say in the Internet world — if you're doing the same thing today you were doing six months ago, you're doing the wrong thing. Parents can learn a lot from that.

The way to tell a really big story, I think, is to tell a really small story.

One day, my daughter Tybee came to me, and she said, ‘I have so much love for you in my body, Daddy, I can’t stop giving you hugs and kisses. And when I have no more love left, I just drink milk, because that’s where love comes from.’

I think that most of the action in religion is around the home, is in families, and is in individual lives, and they can go on their own searches, watch their own TV shows, read their own books, form their own groups and discuss it, but that's where the action is - on the home front.

After a while, a surprising theme emerged. The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: Develop a strong family narrative.

There's a reason the Exodus story has inspired so many Americans. It's a narrative of hope.

Love is a balance between independence and interdependence. In love, you want to be independent and interdependent. You want to be a little bit selfish and a little bit selfless. Love can be an antidote to loneliness, as long as there is some aloneness in it.

Love is a story we tell with another person. It's cocreation through conarration. When you hit bumps in the road and challenges, you write a new chapter in your story together. Love is the constant act of revising and retelling your own story in real time. You don't do it by yourself. You do it with someone else. The only way you do that is to talk to each other and create a shared narrative.

May your first word be adventure and last word love.

Moses became Americas true founding father because he evangelized action; he justified risk. He gave ordinary people the courage to live with uncertainty.

One question hovers over all of us who choose to spend our lives writing: why keep doing this in a world where so many forces are aligned against us?

When you hit the unimaginable, the only answer is imaginativeness. You have to heal with the person that you're suffering with. You have to write a new chapter in your story. A relationship can be a sacred thing, but it's going to be difficult. There are going to be challenges. You are going to have pain. But working it through and being resilient is as sacred and meaningful as having a "Hollywood" romance.

Even Superman's name reflects his creators' biblical knowledge.

When faced with a challenge, happy families, like happy people, just add a new chapter to their life story that shows them overcoming the hardship. This skill is particularly important for children, whose identity tends to get locked in during adolescence.