Nina

“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

“family reunion with Jacob’s discarded booster seats and board games. I am an only child. I have inherited it all. M. goes down there, once in a while, and hauls up a few boxes filled with long plastic containers of slides. There are thousands and thousands of them, mostly from my parents’ vacations, and they’ll be ruined soon if not already. He sifts through them and digitizes the ones”
― 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

“I’m on my chaise, journals spread all over the floor, trying to gather my whole lost tribe of selves around me.”
― Dani Shapiro, Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage