Signal Fires Quotes

“If only time could be seen whole, then you could see the past remaining intact, instead of vanishing in the rearview mirror.”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“Give it all you’ve got, Alice. Waldo kept Mimi Wilf warm and made her feel safe at the end of her life. Maybe all of them are simply a chorus of souls, light touching light.”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“Grief comes in waves. Like the swells crashing against the rocks, it gathers force and breaks when you least expect it”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“There should be a word for the moment just before heartbreak, when the very air quivers with all that is about to come”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“The sunlight is dancing along the whitecaps. It looks as if the sea were filled with thousands upon thousands of flickering stars. Perhaps each one is what remains of every soul who has ever lived; perhaps time is not a continuum, but rather, past, present, and future are always and forever unspooling. The young man standing beside him is the infant he placed on his mother’s belly; the husband and father whose salvation comes in opening his own heart; the elderly astrophysicist who devotes his life to the hunt for habitable exoplanets beyond our solar system. The whole crowd is here, invisible, surrounding them. The air shimmers with everyone he has ever loved. He is near the end of his life, and in another sphere, he is also just beginning. He would like to believe this. And why not? He will find out soon enough.”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“It isn't misery that loves company - no, no. Happiness loves company, and misery - misery just wants to be left alone”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“It’s possible to grow up in the wrong house, on the wrong street, in the wrong town, in the wrong part of the country. It’s possible to go to the wrong school. To have the wrong dad. To be pushed to do the wrong things. But it is also possible to survive all these psychic indignities if you have one, maybe two people who recognize you for who you are.”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“Change one thing and everything changes.”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“The stars, rather than appearing distant and implacable, seemed to be signal fires in the dark, mysterious fellow travelers lighting a path; one hundred thousand million luminous presences beckoning from worlds away. See us. We are here. We have always been here. We will always be here.”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“He would like to turn back time all the way to the beginning of... well, that is the problem. Where to begin?”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“One lesson among many during the pandemic is that plans are mere fantasies. Plans are fungible.
We make plans and God laughs”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“He has a theory that there's a set number of shitty things that can happen in one lifetime, and he's already reached his limit”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“How long will molecular traces of the Wilfs remain inside 18 Division Street?”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“Later, she will come to think of lives as books divided into chapters”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“She is lovelier than ever, but it is her sadness that lights her from within”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“He's not good at this. Words aren't his thing. He's never been able to say what he feels. But people shouldn't make the mistake of leaping to the conclusion that he doesn't feel. He feels plenty”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“He’s been reading James Gleick, and repeats a passage to Ben by heart. “If only time could be seen whole, then you could see the past remaining intact, instead of vanishing in the rearview mirror.”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“They stay like this, two bodies so at home with each other that it is as if each of them had grown and shifted to accommodate the other’s shape over the years, like two grafted trees.”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“She numbs her feelings, because they are bigger than she is.”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“It wasn't scary. I mean, it was scary being in the dark and cold and everything, but when the lady, Mrs. Wilf, died, it was like everything had no beginning, and no end. Like we were lightyears away and here, all at the same time.”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“my”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“There are a few people who will feel her touch—a chill up a spine, a hand in the air, a poem recalled—even if they won’t exactly know it.”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“She doesn’t know how to talk about herself. She is very, very good at telling other people’s stories. She is known, as a producer, to be an unusually good reader of scripts when it comes to character and motivation. She has an excellent sense of structure. But her cheeks redden and she stumbles when she tries to share in meetings. It’s as if the whole of her life rushes in, and she doesn’t know where to begin.”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“There must be that second, bobbing and darting in the aliveness of their shared history, unmistakable, glowing like a firefly in the darkness. If only they could pinpoint it and stop it there, right there, at the small but indelible spot that somehow they missed the first time around, if only, then perhaps their whole family could begin again.”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“only time could be seen whole, then you could see the past remaining intact, instead of vanishing in the rearview mirror.”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“Even when fathers completely screw up and allow every last bit of their own damaged souls to infect their children, still there is a connection”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“Over the years, he's made a point of avoiding them. What is there to say? His gratitude is so wide and deep that it feels, instead, like shame”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“His love for his son is a vast and forceful thing; whatsoever threatens Waldo must be destroyed. But given that it's Waldo who appears to be hurting himself, what can Shenkman d0? What can he do?”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“He's convinced that Waldo is being spoiled - not just in the way that all kids these days are spoiled, but actually being rotted away, bit by internal bit, his character eroded by his parents' lack of conviction”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires

“There's something he finds utterly impossible, unreadable, unreachable about his son”
― Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires