From An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (Daniel Mendelsohn; 2017):

p. 41
This strangely tentative careering between concrete specifics and unhelpful generalities gives you a familiar feeling: the feeling of what it’s like to be lost. Sometimes it’s as if you’re on familiar territory; sometimes you feel at sea, adrift in a featureless liquid void with no landmarks in sight. In this way, the opening of this poem about being lost and finding a way home precisely replicates the surf-like oscillations between drifting and purposefulness the characterize its hero’s journey.

p. 149
Children always imagine that their parents’ truest selves are as parents; but why? “Who really knows his own begetting?“ Telemachus bitterly asks early in the Odyssey. Who indeed. Our parents are mysterious to us in ways we can never quite be mysteries to them.

p. 215
For the best teacher is the one who wants you to find meaning in the things that have given him pleasure, too, so that the appreciation of their beauty will outlive him. In this way — because it arises from an acceptance of the inevitability of death — good teaching is like good parenting.

p. 277
You never do you know, really, where education will lead; who will be listening and, in certain cases, who will be doing with teaching.