Tom Reiss Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Tom Reiss:

The Dumas memoirs - which I also discovered when I was a kid - had a big impact on me.

There's nothing better than to be rootless cosmopolitans who seamlessly merge into whatever society. That's the greatest thing human beings can aspire to. Whether forced by duress, Jews became perfect modern human beings. After the Holocaust, one doesn't really mourn for that - it's too disturbing, seems like a mistake.

Tom Reiss

Today, the world is so awash in sugar - it is such a staple of the modern diet, associated with all that is cheap and unhealthy - that it's hard to believe things were once exactly the opposite. The West Indies were colonized in a world where sugar was seen as a scarce, luxurious, and profoundly health-giving substance.

Tom Reiss

Even arch-isolationists, such as former President Herbert Hoover and Senator Robert Taft of Ohio - two of the most right-wing figures in the Republican Party - insisted on being called liberal.

Tom Reiss

The Dumas memoirs - which I also discovered when I was a kid - had a big impact on me.

Tom Reiss

All anyone agreed on was that Kurban Said was the pen name of a writer who had probably come from Baku, an oil city in the Caucasus, and that he was either a nationalist poet who was killed in the Gulags or the dilettante son of an oil millionaire or a Viennese cafe-society writer who died after stabbing himself in the foot.

Tom Reiss

I've considered myself a writer since I was 7 years old, but I've done a lot of jobs along the way. I enjoyed waiting tables and tending bar during college, especially when it got busy, so I might like managing a big restaurant. In fact, I might like managing many kinds of businesses or organizations.

Tom Reiss

Lev Nussimbaum was born in October 1905, the moment when the tolerant, haute capitaliste culture of Baku began to fall apart.

Tom Reiss

I once started a small business when I got out of college and enjoyed the stress of making it work. High-stress situations clear my head, and I love the challenge of getting along with many different kinds of people. I'm scared of routine.

Tom Reiss

The revolution breaks out; they form this group of swordsmen called the Black Legion. Alex Dumas is there at every moment, protecting the revolution and protecting France, and he rises to the equivalent of a four-star general.

Tom Reiss

Anthropology seems so bland and friendly now, but in the early 20th century, Jews could only be dissected badly by these fields. The Jews were extremely assimilated; it's a different world than now.

Tom Reiss

The demons you have are what motivate you to make your art. This is what drives the detective, this is what drives the painter, this is what drives the writer: a conflicting urge to forget pain and at the same time remember it and fight for some kind of justice. I know these powerful things are inside of me and everyone in some way or another.

Tom Reiss

The first generation of Russian terrorists came out of the '60s counterculture - the 1860s in Russia bearing a striking similarity to the 1960s in the United States, with Russian students growing their hair, following gurus who extolled the 'new man,' and starting communes.

Tom Reiss

Prisoners around the world have said that reading 'The Count of Monte Cristo' helped them get through their ordeal. That's something to aspire to.

Tom Reiss

Remembering people is the most fundamental gesture of love and respect. For me, there are people in my life who are no longer with me, who have died, who are with me as much as any living person because I remember everything about them. My great-uncle, who I got a lot of guidance in life from, meant so much to me.

Tom Reiss

I am definitely of the method-acting school. Everything to me is about sound. I don't dress up in period costumes or anything like that. I'm very aural. When I'm working, I try to soak up the sounds of an era.

Tom Reiss

Napoleon - the people who were becoming Napoleon's generals realized that for him, it was not about spreading freedom and revolution; it was about creating a new empire with Napoleon the dictator or the emperor.

Tom Reiss

As a writer, I can't be a heroic sword fighter like General Dumas, but I can rescue someone who's been taken out of history by using my writing to bring them back.

Tom Reiss

For fifty years, debates about French anti-Semitism mainly revolved around France's record during the Second World War, when the Vichy government collaborated with the Germans.

Tom Reiss

When I was a kid, my mum had a lot of Dumas books in the house, and she's from France originally. My mother had one particular Dumas book that was a family heirloom - this old, beat-up 1938 edition of 'The Count of Monte Cristo' in French. She came to America after losing her parents in World War II as a little kid.

Tom Reiss

In 1817, Czar Alexander I personally founded the Society of Israelite Christians but had less luck defeating Judaism than he'd had defeating Napoleon; gentile serfs and merchants in areas bordering the Pale even showed disturbing new signs of 'Judaizing.'

Tom Reiss

The life of General Alex Dumas is so extraordinary on so many levels that it's easy to forget the most extraordinary fact about it: that it was led by a black man, in a world of whites, at the end of the eighteenth century.

Tom Reiss

Until the absorption of the Polish territories, the Russian Empire had had practically no Jews, and it was uniquely ill-equipped to handle this new addition to its ethnic and religious mix.

Tom Reiss

Eighteenth-century doctors prescribed sugar pills for nearly everything: heart problems, headache, consumption, labor pains, insanity, old age, and blindness. Hence, the French expression 'like an apothecary without sugar' meant someone in an utterly hopeless situation.

Tom Reiss

The French Revolution was a kind of 21st-century moment in the heart of the 18th century - and Alex Dumas, outstanding though he was, could never have risen the way he did if not for that. The French Revolution was the American Revolution on steroids.

Tom Reiss

Alex Dumas was a consummate warrior and a man of great conviction and moral courage. He was renowned for his strength, his swordsmanship, his bravery, and his knack for pulling victory out of the toughest situations. But he was known, too, for his profane back talk and his problems with authority.

Tom Reiss