Nina

“I was always compiling lists in my mind: what had gone wrong, what could go wrong. I hadn’t figured how to live with my heightened awareness of exactly how fragile it all is. And so the lists grew and grew. I was trying to control the universe—and it’s hard work to try to control the universe. I thought that maybe by naming each potential disaster, I could prevent it. Michael could have a heart attack shoveling snow.”
― Dani Shapiro, Devotion

“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. Come closer now and listen. Be thankful for all of it. You would not have walked into that Gramercy Park apartment. You would not have looked into the eyes of the war correspondent just back from Mogadishu. A coup de foudre: a bolt of lightning. You would not have your bright and sunny boy. There is no other life than this. You would not have stumbled into the vastly imperfect, beautiful, impossible present.”
― Dani Shapiro, Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

“can’t part with the framed diplomas of my parents and their siblings. They were the first generation in my family to go to college. How does that get tossed in a Dumpster? My uncle’s pipe, my aunt’s forty-year-old golf clubs, ceramic figurines from my grandmother’s apartment in her assisted-living facility mingle as if at”
― Dani Shapiro, Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

“Just a few months ago, Michael and Jacob had been driving home late at night from a baseball game when someone threw a glass bottle of salad dressing off an embankment. The bottle hit the roof of our car and shattered. One fraction of a second earlier, and it would have hit the windshield. Salad dressing, I thought to myself, when Michael told me what had happened. I never considered salad dressing.”
― Dani Shapiro, Devotion