15 Quotes by Sharon Guskin

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

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.

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?

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

He thought of Heraclitus: a man cannot step in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.

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?

How could your whole life end so quickly? One moment it was there before you – not perfect but yours – and the next it was gone.

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