Laura Moriarty Quotes

#1. She also knew that the sadness she felt while pregnant, for strangers, for the entire world, did not feel like hormones so much as a kind of elevated consciousness, a heightened sensitivity to truth.

Laura Moriarty

#2. It's like swimming, underwater, this whole year. I just close my eyes. hold my breath, and keep kicking.

Laura Moriarty

#3. She was a lover and a lewd cohabitator, a liar and a cherished friend, an aunt and a kindly grandmother, a champion of the fallen, and a late-in-coming fighter for reason over fear. Even in those final hours, quite and rocking, arriving and departing, she knew who she was.

Laura Moriarty

#4. I think if Jesus would have been alive today, he would have been all about the pot. I think he would have really grooved on it, and that's why he would've gone to jail today.

Laura Moriarty

#5. Worrying was painful ... but compared to the alternative, a privilege

Laura Moriarty

#6. Someone needs to give the Pope thirteen babies. Just for a week or so. See how he likes no birth control then.

Laura Moriarty

#7. You don't belong here if you are unhappy," she continued. "Your mother makes you hateful, and you make her hateful. It doesn't matter if she's your mother. It's an accident of birth. It doesn't have to mean so much." ... "You belong where you have the best chance of being happy ...

Laura Moriarty

#8. To someone who grows up by the stockyards, that smell just smells like air. You don't know what a younger person might someday think of you, and whatever stench we still breathe in without noticing.

Laura Moriarty

#9. I learned a lot of details about 1920s clothes, cars, kitchen appliances, and food. I had a character eating peanut butter in one scene until I learned that peanut butter wasn't commercially packaged and sold until 1924.

Laura Moriarty

#10. One way to remain
unfinished is to stop.
the other is to go on.

Laura Moriarty

#11. This life is mine because of good luck. And because I reached out and took it.

Laura Moriarty

#12. Eileen says what they should really do, if they want to be fair about it, is offer a Bible study class for credit, and let us take that instead of sitting an extra hour in study hall, twiddling our so-called opposable thumbs.

Laura Moriarty

#13. She was grateful life could be long.

Laura Moriarty

#14. He was right to insist. If they put her on a train,

Laura Moriarty

#15. Perhaps all the difficulties of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering in the early years wouldn't

Laura Moriarty

#16. I wasn't that familiar with silent films. I didn't know, for example, how hugely popular silent films were in the 1920s, how people would go to the movies several times a week.

Laura Moriarty

#17. Schopenhauer writes about marriage. He says getting married is like grasping blind into a sack of snakes and hoping to find an eel.

Laura Moriarty

#18. Yes, Louise Brooks was beautiful and intelligent, and she could be very funny, but obviously there was a deep insecurity there, a real destructive rage and immaturity.

Laura Moriarty

#19. I don't think I've ever tried on a corset, though a certain bridesmaid's dress did require a torturous bustier that will stay forever burned in my sensory memory.

Laura Moriarty

#20. Men don't want candy that's been unwrapped. Maybe for a lark, but not when it comes to marriage. It may still be perfectly clean, but if it's unwrapped, they don't know where it's been.

Laura Moriarty

#21. compassion is the basis of all morality.

Laura Moriarty

#22. I always found Louise Brooks interesting. She was an icon of the silent - film era, and I knew she'd grown up in Kansas, and that she was smart and rebellious and sharp - tongued.

Laura Moriarty

#23. I'm drawn to intergenerational tension, and it must have been strong in the 1920s: I wondered how Louise's [Brooks] generation of flappers appeared to the women who came of age at the beginning of the century - wearing corsets, long skirts, and high collars.

Laura Moriarty

#24. The young can exasperate, of course, and frighten, and condescend, and insult, and cut you with their still unrounded edges. But they can also drag you, as you protest and scold and try to pull away, right up to the window of the future, and even push you through.

Laura Moriarty

#25. Was it mad to at least try to live as one wished, or as clost to it as possible? This life is mine, seh would think sometimes. This life is mine because of good luck. And because I reached out and took it.
-Cora

Laura Moriarty

#26. ...I am supposed to be where I go."
-Joseph

Laura Moriarty

#27. You could push people away, past their limits, even accidentally, and then it was just too late to get them back

Laura Moriarty

#28. This is how it is now. This is my life.

Laura Moriarty