Nadja Spiegelman
Nadja Spiegelman is an American writer. She is the author of “I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This”, a memoir about her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother and the fallibility of memory. (Nadja Spiegelman Quotes)
“According to neuroscientists, when we stir up a long-term memory, it floats in our consciousness, unstable, for a window of approximately three hours. During this time, the memory is malleable. The present infiltrates the past. We add details to fill in the gaps. Then the brain re-encodes the memory as if it were new, writing over the old one. As it sinks back down into the depths of our minds, we are not even aware of what we have gained or lost, or why.”
Nadja Spiegelman
“I saw a pattern forming, like a series of skipping stones that sent ripples through the generations: all the granddaughters and grandmothers who loved each other, all the mothers left stranded in between.”
Nadja Spiegelman
“I saw all the ways in which she worked to be a very different mother from her own. And I also saw how much the past, so long kept secret, pulled us into formations like a deep ocean current, from so far below that we barely knew we were not moving on our own.”
Nadja Spiegelman
“My father’s graphic novel Maus about his parents’ experiences in the concentration camps, won a Pulitzer Prize when I was five.”
Nadja Spiegelman
“Oh Nadja!” my mother said. ‘You’re still stuck in your black-and-white phase of good and evil. The world is more complicated than that.”
Nadja Spiegelman
“The past shaped the present, but the present also reshaped the past.”
Nadja Spiegelman
“The things my mother did not see about herself, I did not see, either.”
Nadja Spiegelman
“We knew, my brother and I, that it was only fear that led to danger. My mother cast around us her conviction that we would always be safe, and it held us like a force field.”
Nadja Spiegelman
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