The Forgetting Time Quotes

“He thought of Heraclitus: a man cannot step in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“You Only Live Once. That's what people said, as if life really mattered because it happened only one time. But what if it was the other way around? What if what you did mattered MORE because life happened again and again, consequences unfolding across centuries and contents? What if you had chances upon chances to love the people you loved, to fix what you screwed up, to get it right?”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“Why were we all hoarding love, stockpiling it, when it was all around us, moving in and out of us like the air, if only we could feel it?”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“Denise would never get over it. She knew that. Tommy's bones at the bottom of the well. She and Henry had spent some time with those bones. When the police had finished testing and tagging and photohgraphing them the funeral parlor had given them time before the burial. She'd clutched them to her chest. Run her fingertips along the smooth sockets that had held his shining eyes. There but not there.

Some part of her wanted those bones. Wanted to put the femurs under her pillow at night when she went to sleep. To carry his skull around in her purse so she'd be with him always.

She understood now how people went crazy and did crazy things.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“What strange creatures other human beings are, he thought. It’s amazing anyone ever connects.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“No matter how careful you planned or did your research, the unknowable things would rise up out of the deep and overturn everything. But that was what had drawn him in, wasn't it? The depths of what we don't know?”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“Her mom... had always been there, her love as basic and necessary as gravity, until one day she wasn't.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“In the event of a change in cabin pressure, the flight attendant on the video was saying, you put your oxygen mask on first, pulling the cord, and then you helped others in your party who needed your assistance. The video showed a nice-looking dad tugging the oxygen mask over his own face, his placid daughter sitting quietly beside him, breathing bad air.
What kind of idiot came up with that rule? The didn't understand human nature at all.
She imagined the compartment filling slowly with smoke and Noah beside her, gasping. Did they really think that she could straighten the mask on her own face and breathe in clean air while her asthmatic son struggled to take a breath? The assumption was that she and her child were two different entities with seperate hearts and lungs and minds. They didn't realise that when your child was gasping for air, you felt your own breath trapped in your chest.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“The secret to life is ice cream.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“You tried so hard to give your kid food that was healthy, she thought. The soy cheese pizza. The organic peas and broccoli and baby carrots. The smoothies. The hormone-free milk. The leafy greens. You kept processed food to a minimum, threw Halloween candy out after a week. Never let him eat the icies they sold in the park, because they had red and yellow dye in them. And then you gave him this?”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“The vodka warmed his body nicely, like an invisible hand stroking him in places no one had touched in years.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“And if anger and fear could persist—then also, of course, stronger emotions could as well, such as love. Was that what drew some people back to reincarnate within their own families? Was that what caused some children to remember their past connections? And if so, then perhaps this phenomenon, these children’s memories he had studied so carefully, was not against the laws of nature, after all. Perhaps it was the foundational law of nature that they were proving, what he’d been documenting and analyzing for over thirty years without knowing it: the force of love. He shook his head. His brain was going soft, maybe. Or maybe not. He’d kept so many of these questions at bay all these years, and now they whirled around him, touching him with something like awe, on their way to someplace else.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“Up the river, toward the city, buttery sunlight bounced off the Temple of the Dawn, scattering color into the air like a jewel.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“Could there be grief so unresolved and potent that it continued on, flowed into the next life as powerfully as a birth defect or a birthmark, where still it could not be shaken?”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“Now Janie ordered a drink and glanced at the bar menu, choosing the goat curry because she'd never had it before.
"You sure about that?" the barman said. He was a boy, really, no more than twenty, with a slim body and huge, laughing eyes. "It's spicy."
"I can take it," she said, smiling at him, wondering if she might pull an adventure out of her hat on her next-to-last night, and what it would be like to touch another body again. But the boy simply nodded and brought her the dish a short time later, not even watching to see how she fared with it.
The goat curry roared in her mouth.
"I'm impressed. I don't think I could eat that stuff," remarked the man sitting two seats down from her. He was somewhere in the midst of middle age, a bust of a man, all chest and shoulders, with a ring of blond, bristling hair circling his head like the laurels of Julius Caesar and a boxer's nose beneath bold, undefeated eyes. He was the only other guest that wasn't with the wedding party. She'd seen him around the hotel and on the beach and had been uninspired by his business magazines, his wedding ring.
She nodded back at him and took an especially large spoonful of curry, feeling the heat oozing from every pore.
"Is it good?"
"It is, actually," she admitted, "in a crazy, burn-your-mouth-out kind of way." She took a sip of the rum and Coke she'd ordered; it was cold and startling after all that fire.
"Yeah?" He looked from her plate to her face. The tops of his cheeks and his head were bright pink, as if he'd flown right up to the sun and gotten away with it. "Mind if I have a taste?"
She stared at him, a bit nonplussed, and shrugged. What the hell.
"Be my guest."
He moved quickly over to the seat next to hers. He picked up her spoon and she watched as it hovered over her plate and then dove down and scooped a mouthful of her curry, depositing between his lips.
"Jee-sus," he said. He downed a glass of water. "Jee-sus Christ." But he was laughing as he said it, and his brown eyes were admiring her frankly over the rim of his water glass. He'd probably noticed her smiling at the bar boy and decided she was up for something.
But was she? She looked at him and saw it all instantaneously: the interest in his eyes, the smooth, easy way he moved his left hand slightly behind the roti basket, temporarily obscuring the finger with the wedding ring.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“How could your whole life end so quickly? One moment it was there before you - not perfect but yours – and the next it was gone.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“This never would have happened in India. In India they understood that life unfolded the way it unfolded, whether you liked it or not: the cow in the road, the swerve that saves or kills you. One life ended, a new one began, maybe it was better than the last one, maybe it wasn't. The Indians (and the Thais, and the Sri Lankans) accepted this the way they accepted monsoons or the heat, with a resignation that was like simple good sense. Damned Americans. Americans, unschooled in the burning dung heaps and the sudden swerves, Americans couldn't help but cling tightly to the life they were living like clutching a spindly branch that was sure to break … and when things didn't go quite as expected, Americans lost their shit. Himself included.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“YOLO. A slogan, a rallying cry, carpe diem for the skateboarder set: You only live once. But was it true? That was the problem, wasn’t it? She had never thought about it in any deep way. She hadn’t had the time or inclination to speculate about other lives: this one was hard enough to manage.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“He was almost six, that tender age when the baby plumpness starts to melt away from children's bodies and you can see, in their newly angular faces, the people they might become.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“The world was more dangerous than it had been a few weeks ago. It was a world that slipped and slid beneath you, where children died because mothers forgot to check the latch. How did you keep your child safe in that kind of world?”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“The Little Sprouts director was a lion, a witch, and a wardrobe all in one.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“A Kishajtások igazgatónője egy személyben maga volt az oroszlán, a boszorkány és a ruhásszekrény.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“... megremegett a hangja, a profizmus vékony hártyáját törött csontként szúrta át a rettegés.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“Annyi szó van. Még nem állt készen arra, hogy lemondjon róluk. Szerette mindet. Shakespeare. Sótartó. Sheila.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“Nézze, mennyi vesztenivalóm van! Magában dühöngött. Olyan dolgok, amikről sohasem hittem volna, hogy elveszíthetem őket. Van élet Shakespeare után? Na, ezt a kérdést érdemes feltenni.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“Hát nem ezt kereste - ezt a szárnyalást, amely vágtában érkezik, elkap a derekadnál fogva, és magával ragad? Hogyan is állhatna ellen neki, pedig tudja, hogy a földön végzi majd összetörve? Feltételezte, hogy van más módja is annak, hogy az ember megtapasztalja, milyen lélegzetelállító élmény élni - talán valamiféle zsigeri dolog?-, de fogalma sem volt, mi az, és hogyan juthat hozzá.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“Dél körül értek oda, és kedélyes csendbe burkolózva követték a túravezetőt a dzsungelbe, vihogtak a madarak elnevezésein: a sárgás cukormadáron, a szuszókon, az arapongán, a kéktorkú motmoton, a mókuskakukkon, a csónakcsőrű bentévin.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“of her spine and rise, giddily, up her body. So this was what it was like: the present moment. She felt it like a revelation.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“thus had a somewhat outsized sense of her own importance relative to the universe’s grand scheme.”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time

“Sex, like death, was important, and yet why did no one seem to care enough to ask the questions that mattered?”
― Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time