Bruce Feiler

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

“Fathers can find great inspiration in faith.”

“Abraham is the shared ancestor of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He stands at the heart of these three faiths. And yet you know almost nothing about him.”

“Happy families do have certain things in common. Today we finally have the knowledge to know what those things are.”

“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.”

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

“If you tell your own story to your children - that includes your positive moments and your negative moments, and how you overcame them - you give your children the skills and the confidence they need to feel like they can overcome some hardship that they've felt.”

“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.”

“I was surprised how relevant the Moses story was to contemporary American debates - from our ongoing debate about values, to our role as champions of freedom, to our place as a country that welcome immigrants.”

“Everybody has heard that family dinner is great for kids. But unfortunately, it doesn't work in many of our lives.”

“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.”

“I say the same thing that I've said for decades now, which is: don't go over to Japan trying to change it, thinking that you know better. Go there trying to understand.”

“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.”

“Celebrate your family's bleakest moments and how your relatives overcame them. In doing so, you will encounter darkness, but you'll give your children the confidence that they, too, shall overcome.”

“Don't forget, God uses words to create the world. Words! Words are only hope.”

“Religion is increasingly a woman's domain in America.”

“Children who plan their own schedules and evaluate their own work build up their brains and learn to take more responsibility.”

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

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

“The biblical story is in dialogue with the other stories of its time. And if the Bible can be in dialogue with other cultures, why can't the people who are descendants of the Bible be in dialogue with other cultures?”