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" We struggle throughout our lives to learn to accept the shell that transports us through this world, and many of us take great effort to change it. I believe everyone has at least once looked in the mirror and thought, 'That is not me. I am someone else. The world cannot see me as I really am.' "

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" If the Latterday Saints had not abandoned plural marriage, they would have remained a fringe religion and would never have moved into mainstream American culture. Today, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints thrives. It is one of the fastest growing religions in the country and is the most successful American-born religion. "

David Ebershoff

Today

Marriage

Culture

" I first read 'The Scarlet Letter' when I was fifteen. In it, I found a familiar vision of religious intolerance to the one around me. I grew up in the 1980s, when televangelists, with their fluffed up hair and their tears, self-righteously denounced all kinds of sinners, reserving a special, full-throated enthusiasm for gay people. "

David Ebershoff

People

Hair

" I usually don't throw around the word 'fabulous,' but how else to describe buildings decorated with mirrored water dragons, serpents tiled in colored glass, and hundreds - no, thousands, no, tens of thousands - of gold-leaf Buddhas? Luang Prabang has more than 47,000 residents, but its Buddha population must be ten times that. "

" I love to read history; at its best, it is an art. "

" I always love novels that open up a subject to me - like raising a window to a beautiful, mysterious world outside. "

" In some ways, writing a novel, especially a novel set in the past and about characters who once lived, is about amassing enough details and arranging them properly in order to offer the reader a verisimilitude that satisfies his or her curiosity about the story at hand. "

" An artist sees that which does not yet exist. He or she imagines a future others cannot perceive. The artist - and the writer - reshapes reality so that it becomes even more vivid and lasting. "

" When I see someone interesting on the subway - the lady with her new Bible or the delivery guy holding down a dozen Mylar balloons - my mind goes in two different directions. Where are they coming from? And where are they going? "

" History devours, but at times it resurrects. Some lives must wait for history to catch up. "

David Ebershoff

History

Some

" Sometimes when I travel, I like to close my eyes and imagine visiting during another era. "

David Ebershoff

Imagine

Travel

" 'The Danish Girl' was published in 2000. Then it, too, would disappear, as most books do. It fell out of print almost everywhere. I wrote other books and, as an editor, worked on dozens more. Yet always, Lili stayed with me. "

David Ebershoff

Always

" The soles of the best writers, a professor once told me, are worn down to holes. This is an incomplete measure, but the image of a writer grinding his or her shoes against curbs and cobblestones stuck with me. The story is always out there, the details around the corner or down the alley. "

" We are born, we live, we disappear. One of the chilling aspects of history is the swiftness with which it carries us into oblivion. "

" Even the most meticulous historians work subjectively. The historian's point of view, his or her selection of subject and sources, the emphasis, the tone - all of these lead to subjective history, inevitably so. I do not say this as a criticism, merely as an observation. "

" I'm not the kind of writer that can write eight hours a day... I'm the kind of writer that the more time I have, the less efficient I am. "

David Ebershoff

Time

Day

" Marriage fascinates me: how we negotiate its span, how we change within it, how it changes itself, and why some relationships survive and others do not. There isn't a single marriage that couldn't provide enough narrative arc for a novel. "

David Ebershoff

Enough

Change

" Since I was a kid, I feel most confident when I'm reading. "