She was someone who heard each grain in the hour-glass, she felt the passing seconds like sandpaper against her softest skin. Time actually seemed to hurt her, and people helped her get through it. [.] Sometimes it seemed to Nathan that her life was just that, a feat of held breath, just another ten seconds, just another five, and then death would flood her lungs like water, a string of glass bubbles to the surface and then nothing. She was scared in a way that he could understand. The kind of fear that sends you running across a six-lane highway or jumping into rapids. She was someone who ran towards her fear, screaming. Who tried to frighten it. Who, in another period of history, would have been worshipped as a saint or burned as a witch.Rupert Thomson
About This Quote
The third line, "She was someone who heard each grain in the hour-glass, she felt the passing seconds like sandpaper against her softest skin," is one of my personal favorites. I like this line because it is very vivid and specific. Each grain in the hourglass, every second of time that passes, feels like it is kind of like sandpaper or iron against your skin. You can feel it pretty accurately when you are in that moment because time is passing so quickly.
For example, when you are in a moment when you are deep in conversation with someone and you know they are across the room talking to someone else, you can feel when their eyes meet with yours because time seems to slow down for you emotionally. The same happens with the passage of time when something bad happens to you or someone close to you. When your world gets flipped upside down and you think that nothing will ever be right again, then time just seems to run slowly for a while.
You experience it as being harder to breathe at first because of the shock of what has happened. If you have never had something bad happen to someone close to you, then maybe this perspective will not be so clear but once you have experienced something bad happening to anyone it becomes more clear how everything seems to run at a slower pace than usual.
Source: The Five Gates Of Hell
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More Quotes By Rupert Thomson
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