Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from The Forgotten Hours:
She’d started to understand there was a chasm between how people saw their lives, how they wanted others to see them, and how they really were. A chasm that was too deep and dark to explore.
It turns out that no one believes her anyway, and that lack of belief in her festers, infects her through and through—because, in her heart, she wants to be an honest person, and she thought she was. But she is not fully honest with anyone, not even with herself. It turns out she cannot give voice to uncertainty; this is not allowed. She does not need to be told this to know it is true. So she becomes quiet; she continues her journey inward, a journey she will be on for years, alone, unable to share with anyone, not her family, not her friends, not her lover.
But she had not been tempted to look him up back then. She’d become accustomed to the sense of herself as separate from all others, and there was something comforting about that. It was best to keep the past just out of reach, hovering a little more than arm’s length away. While she knew it was there, could sense it, she carefully kept those memories out of her grasp, and she sometimes seemed to forget the past entirely. But that was an illusion. Her memories of Jack, of Lulu—of life before—were not actually gone and forgotten; they lived on inside her, shadows of a bleached-out stain.
feelings were not facts, memories lied, and people were not who you thought they were.
She understood then that she was truly alone inside herself, as were all human beings on earth.
Everything we choose to do has consequences. And people do not change unless they want to change. They show us their colors; we just don’t see them.
Too often, people who suffered trauma let themselves be defined by it, and she has been determined to avoid that fate.
Silence isn’t always empty, is it?
You could never truly be objective or dispassionate; your biases would always drive the way you saw reality and expressed facts.
People thought whatever they thought. There was no changing people’s minds now.
In each person she encountered, she detected a whiff of sad-eyed need, the perpetual desire to be noticed and understood.
It would be nice to have space to live, to have company, a life that added up to more than days piled on top of one another without accruing the additional freight of meaning or purpose.
Her anger lurks, voracious and annihilating, behind the door she has slammed shut, and she cannot risk letting it out.
Time seems immense; it is seconds and minutes and hours; it accumulates, heals, and hurts.
was possible, she realized, to know someone intimately and yet not know them at all.
In that instant she saw that the dreams she’d had of this man were misplaced. Those memories of the time they’d shared as kids had assumed a significance, a kind of bloated purity, that was all out of proportion with reality; they had been sweet moments she could hang on to, promises of how life could have been. But it wasn’t real.
inside there raged a blood-soaked battle between what she wanted, what she deserved, and what she could actually have.
She was looking for something that was already right in front of her: a solid mass, something concrete, not ephemeral. A person whose quiet forward motion created a place for her—not to hide in but to be safe enough so she could become herself again.
Her father approached life as though it had been designed with his entertainment in mind, while it was the opposite for other adults, who were compelled to accommodate him.
human beings were always compelled to bring their own agenda to any endeavor.
Nothing will stop time but death, and even then that’s not certain.
me any time on 2129956732.
Reading that book made her understand that there were no exceptions to the rule: human beings were always compelled to bring their own agenda to any endeavor.
She looks down at her bleeding cuticles, the dry, ragged skin of her fingertips, and she says what she believes to be true: nothing escaped her. It turns out that no one believes her anyway, and that lack of belief in her festers, infects her through and through—because, in her heart, she wants to be an honest person, and she thought she was. But she is not fully honest with anyone, not even with herself. It turns out she cannot give voice to uncertainty; this is not allowed. She does not need to be told this to know it is true. So she becomes quiet; she continues her journey inward, a journey she will be on for years, alone, unable to share with anyone, not her family, not her friends, not her lover.
A mother, done? Done with being there for her family—was there a worse sin?
promising pellucid shine: she knows exactly what she
Most often in the summertime, she’s holed up somewhere with a book, sometimes not saying more than a few words in a whole day. Give her a few glasses of wine, and she turns into Petula Clark.
There’s nothing more important than being an honorable man.
Asking gives life to fear—it’s better to be silent.
Too often, people who suffered trauma
