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Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage QUOTES

Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage QUOTES

1 " Years vanish. Months collapse. Time is like a tall building made of playing cards. It seems orderly until a strong gust of wind comes along and blows the whole thing skyward. Imagine it: an entire deck of cards soaring like a flock of birds. "

― Dani Shapiro , Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

2 " For years we had the persistent sensation in our life and art - John Updike's phrase - that we were just beginning. "

― Dani Shapiro , Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

3 " Oh, child! Somewhere inside you, your future has already unfurled like one of those coiled-up party streamers, once shiny, shaken loose, floating gracefully for a brief moment, now trampled underfoot after the party is over. The future you’re capable of imagining is already a thing of the past. Who did you think you would grow up to become? You could never have dreamt yourself up. Sit down. Let me tell you everything that’s happened. You can stop running now. You are alive in the woman who watches you as you vanish. "

― Dani Shapiro , Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

4 " I've become convinced that our lives are shaped less by the mistakes we make than when we make them. There is less elasticity now. Less time to bounce back. And so I heed the urgent whisper and move with greater and greater deliberation. "

― Dani Shapiro , Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

5 " From Carl Jung: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate. "

― Dani Shapiro , Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

6 " You know,” my aunt says, “I once had a terribly difficult period that lasted twenty-four years.” Wait. Twenty-four years? “And it was so important to realize that I didn’t know what was on the other side of the darkness. Every so often there was a sliver of light that shot the whole world through with mystery and wonder, and reminded me: I didn’t have all the information.” — "

― Dani Shapiro , Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

7 " Sometimes I think I have organized the inner crowd. For a brief, breathtaking moment, I feel completely whole. I understand that I am composed of many selves that make up a single chorus. To listen to the music this chorus makes, to recognize it as music, as something noble, varied, patterned, sublime--that is the work of a lifetime. "

― Dani Shapiro , Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

8 " We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention. Lovemaking is not a third thing but two-in-one. John Keats can be a third thing, or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Dutch interiors, or Monopoly. For many couples, children are a third thing.” — "

― Dani Shapiro , Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

9 " I cannot bring myself to even idly wish any of it—not even the most painful parts—away. Eighteen years. Change even one moment, and the whole thing unravels. The narrative thread doesn’t stretch in a line from end to end, but rather, spools and unspools, loops around and returns again and again to the same spot. "

― Dani Shapiro , Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

10 " Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror,” Rilke wrote. Nearly "

― Dani Shapiro , Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

11 " From Carl Jung: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.” — "

― Dani Shapiro , Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

12 " Apparently, using two spaces after a period has become anachronistic. But tell that to my right thumb. — "

― Dani Shapiro , Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

13 " You know,” my aunt says, “I once had a terribly difficult period that lasted twenty-four years.” Wait. Twenty-four years? “And it was so important to realize that I didn’t know what was on the other side of the darkness. Every so often there was a sliver of light that shot the whole world through with mystery and wonder, and reminded me: I didn’t have all the information. "

― Dani Shapiro , Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

14 " While in Aspen, I was on a panel one evening with Andre Dubus III, who spoke of what happens when a memoir devolves into self-pity: “Wah, wah, wah. Should we call the wambulance? "

― Dani Shapiro , Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

15 " How do you suppose time works? A slippery succession of long hours adding up to ever-shorter days and years that disappear like falling dominoes? "

― Dani Shapiro , Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

16 " Form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.” — "

― Dani Shapiro , Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

17 " Our shared vocabulary—our own language—will die with us. We are the treasure itself: fathoms deep, in the world we have made and made again. "

― Dani Shapiro , Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

18 " I believe he doesn’t regret it. But still, has being with me stopped him from being him? "

― Dani Shapiro , Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

19 " How can I tell her that her lists will not protect her? "

― Dani Shapiro , Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

20 " But I think that at the moment of my death, I’d like to be looking at those pictures of everyone I have ever loved. "

― Dani Shapiro , Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage