Sharon Guskin Quotes

Up the river, toward the city, buttery sunlight bounced off the Temple of the Dawn, scattering color into the air like a jewel.

The vodka warmed his body nicely, like an invisible hand stroking him in places no one had touched in years.

What strange creatures other human beings are, he thought. It's amazing anyone ever connects.

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.

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?

Sex, like death, was important, and yet why did no one seem to care enough to ask the questions that mattered?

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.

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?

And wasn't this what she'd been after--this lightness that came galloping through, grabbing you by the waist and hauling you along with it? How could you not surrender yourself to it, even if you knew you'd end up sitting bruised in the dirt? She supposed there must be another way to experience that breathless rush of being alive--something inward, perhaps?--but she didn't know what it was or how to get there on her own.

Her mom... had always been there, her love as basic and necessary as gravity, until one day she wasn't.

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.

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?

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.

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?