Leaving Time Quotes
"When I was nine—before I grew up and became a scientist—I thought I knew everything, or at least I wanted to know everything, and in my mind there was no difference between the two."
"Maybe it was because the silk lining inside my mother’s fur coat, the one she had inherited from her own mother, was made from an Indian sari and printed with elephants."
"Elephants were the largest land animals on the planet, sometimes weighing more than six tons."
"An elephant calf might sometimes suck its trunk."
"This is how, at age nine, I became an elephant advocate."
"The moral of this story is that sometimes, you can attempt to make all the difference in the world, and it still is like trying to stem the tide with a sieve."
"The kind of memory you have about the world, like knowing that stoves are hot."
"Memory is linked to strong emotion, and that negative moments are like scribbling with permanent marker on the wall of the brain."
"I’ve practically got it memorized, no pun intended."
"I may not be able to change my future, but I’m sure as hell going to try to figure out my past."
"I’m the princess in an ivory tower, except every brick is made of history, and I built this prison myself."
"When someone leaves you once, you expect it to happen again."
"The memories on the other side of my mother’s disappearance are just as spotty."
"All good science starts with a hypothesis, which is just a hunch dressed up in fancy vocabulary."
"There’s nothing written, yet, about what happens to the mother who loses her baby."
"Knowing what you know, and not being able to do a damn thing about it."
"It’s not like we all hang out at the Paranormal Café on Wednesday nights."
"If you don’t buy a ticket, you never even have a chance."
"I don’t know why your mother isn’t coming through to me. It could be because she’s alive, not dead."
"Just because you screwed up once doesn’t mean you’ll screw up again."
"We are a race that sees the Virgin Mary in the cut stump of a tree."
"The only supernatural power at work here is the ability of the average person to find meaning in random details."
"That’s the hard part, honey. Knowing what you know, and not being able to do a damn thing about it."
"The moral of this story is that no matter how much we try, no matter how much we want it… some stories just don’t have a happy ending."
"Sometimes, when I really miss her, I eat French toast, just so that I can close my eyes and breathe in."
"The sun’s swinging low, using a cloud as a hammock."
"You can’t blame someone if they honestly don’t understand that their reality isn’t the same as yours."
"Every time I used to ask my spirit guides questions about what it was like in their world, they’d make it clear there were some things I wasn’t supposed to know."
"You know how sometimes you have a dream about someone from your past who you barely remember and whose name you couldn’t recall if your life depended on it? It means that you accessed that path serendipitously, and found a bit of buried treasure."
"Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and find her watching me sleep."
"It’s not easy to find a home for seven elephants."
"Logic says that if I have been right—if my mother never would have willingly left me—then she would have come for me. Which, obviously, she didn’t."
"There is something I never told anyone about that case."
"The last thing Kenosi saw, before he closed his eyes forever, was his mother coming back to him."
"Grandmothers in Botswana tell their children that if you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, you must go together."
"Elephants are often seen checking in with others in their herd by rubbing against an individual, stroking with a trunk, putting that trunk in a friend’s mouth after that individual has suffered a stressful experience."
"I believe we’ve lived many times and have been reincarnated many times, and a spirit is the amalgam of all the lifetimes in which that soul existed."
"The universe calls, you don’t place it on hold."
"There is a reason I keep circling back to this girl. It’s either because of her gravitational pull or because she’s a drain I’m bound to be sucked down."
"In the wild, elephants do not stand on their hind legs or walk grabbing each other’s tails or skip around in a ring."
"If you notice someone talking to a person you can’t see, she may be a paranoid schizophrenic. But she may also just be psychic."
"I wanted to ask him if sanctuary elephants stayed with the bodies of those they’d considered family."
"When you approach wild elephants, you do it the way you’d want your own worst enemy to approach you."
"But play is part of life. I’ve seen a matriarch slide down a steep bank on her butt, just for fun."
"When an elephant is brought to us at the sanctuary, she’s already broken. We do our best to put her back together again."
"People who work with animals do it because they’re no good around other people."
"Elephants walk as if they have music being piped into their heads that no one else can hear."
"I work with elephants because it’s like watching people at a café."
"Grief is like a really ugly couch. It never goes away. You can decorate around it; you can slap a doily on top of it; you can push it to the corner of the room—but eventually, you learn to live with it."
"Maybe I started crying; I can’t remember. But Thomas was so close now that I could smell the soap on his skin."
"Our girls play in the water all the time," Thomas said, delighted. "I figured they picked that behavior up at the zoos where they used to live, as distraction."
"It’s amazing," Gideon said, "what they’re willing to excuse."
"You can tell a lot about a person from their house."
"Keeping a secret isn’t always lying. Sometimes it’s the only way to protect the person you love."
"Being bipolar is like being forced to take LSD."
"It’s not that he doesn’t love you enough to tell you the truth. It’s that he loves you too much to risk it."
"The good news is, if that’s what’s actually going on with your husband, it’s treatable."
"Imagine the work that could be done with veterans who suffer from PTSD."
"It doesn’t matter if it’s accurate; it matters if it’s important in some way to you."
"I could barely see anything but stars at the edges of my vision."
"A bruise is how the body remembers it’s been wronged."
"Just because I know now that she didn’t want to leave me behind doesn’t make it easier, you know?"
"But no one ever mentions that once you get there, you still have to turn around and head all the way home."
"I realized he wasn’t just talking about Jenna in the enclosures. And that I wasn’t the only one thinking of sole custody."
"I knew that these elephants had worked with humans in zoos and circuses, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t charge someone who invaded their domain."
"Jenna had needed a mother, and I hadn’t been there."
"We’ve all got missing pieces. But for a little while, I believed that, together, we might be whole."
"The spirit world is modeled on the real world, and the real things we’ve seen."
"We named that baby Molatlhegi. In Tswana, it means, 'the lost one.'"
"I knew how deep the water got, and how quickly that could happen."
"When I opened my mouth, a thousand stones poured out."
"I realized that the first bloody streaks of dawn were in the sky."
"Sometimes she sang. Sometimes she read journal articles."
"I’ve already felt something my mother felt. Loved."
"There are an endless number of people who have left a love-shaped hole in the heart of someone else."
"It’s a miracle that anyone survives, when so much of us is missing."
"You keep looking for your family, Jenna. But it’s always been right under your nose."