Bruce Feiler Quotations

The most successful families embrace and elevate their family history, particularly their failures, setbacks and other missteps.

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.

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.

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

The simplest consequence of walking on crutches is that you walk slower. Every step must be a necessary one. When you hurry, you get where you're going, but you get there alone. When you go slow, you get where you're going, but you get there with a community you've built along the way.

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.

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

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

One of the core ideas of the Bible is that meaning can be found in history. The sheer act of telling and retelling stories helps us to understand God's role in the world as well as our own position in a long line of ancestors who have wrestled with similar issues to the ones we wrestle with every day.

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.

I grew up in the age of discount air fare, and for me, the act of joining a culture was a great way about learning about that different culture. So I grew up in the South, and went to college in the North, and found out that I learned about myself as a Southerner by leaving the South and going to the Northeast.

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

Superman's original name was Kal-El, or Swift God. His father's name was Jor-El. Superman was clearly drawn as a modern-day god.

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

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

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.

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

The older I get, the more I realize that religion is not going to be easily marginalized by one of its wannabe successors - science, capitalism, consumerism.

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

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

Let your kids pick their punishments. Our instinct as parents is to order our kids around. It's easier, and we're usually right! But it rarely works.

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.

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.

It is our responsibility to find God in someone who is different from us. I think that God basically says, 'I created diversity on purpose, and it is your responsibility to figure out how to make it work.'

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

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

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.

'Walking the Bible' describes the year that I spent retracing the five books of Moses through the desert, and I was actually working on a follow-up, which would look at the rest of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.

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.

Americans know more about religion than almost any other topic.

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

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

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

I set out to write an anti-parenting parenting book.

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.

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?

Religion is increasingly a woman's domain in America.

All couples have been told to schedule regular one-on-one time. 'Date night' is the default answer to most problems in modern marriages. And research backs this up.

It turns out there's only 10 minutes of productive conversation in any family dinner. The rest is taken up with 'take your elbows off the table' and 'pass the ketchup.' And what researchers have found is you can take that 10 minutes and put it in any time of the day and get the benefit. So, if you can't have family dinner, have family breakfast!

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.’

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.

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.

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

May your first word be adventure and last word love.

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

There is profundity to explore, but also laundry to do.

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.

Fathers can find great inspiration in faith.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

One of the reasons Abraham is an important figure in the world today is because he is not a saint,

For the vast majority of believers today, Scripture is a route to God but not necessarily the destination.

I was wading waist deep in the freezing, raw sewage of Jerusalem in some quixotic attempt to discover how King David had captured his capital,

People can see in him what they want,

It's a story that fails as history, but that's why it succeeds as scripture -- because it's elliptical, ... The story has the ability to be perpetually now.

I definitely subscribe to the idea that 9/11, to use an overused phrase, was a wake-up call. There was a year-long national teach-in on Islam - everyone read books and suddenly talked about Islam, and that was very productive. But there's no doubt that moment has passed.

The great religions were not born in isolation from one another; they cannot survive in isolation from one another.