Sarah Moss Quotes

#1. I personally don't like depressing subjects, people say, as if mortality is a lifestyle choice, disease and violence and sorrow a matter of taste.

Sarah Moss

#2. Stories have endings; that's why we tell them, for reassurance that there is meaning in our lives. But like a diagnosis, a story can become a prison, a straight road mapped out by the people who went before. Stories are not the truth.

Sarah Moss

#3. It was important to tell people. To let people know that this can happen. Your child's body can stop. Stop breathing, stop beating.

Sarah Moss

#4. Here, just below the Earth's summit, there are towns and villages, a tangle of human lives, in the shadow of Arctic eschatology.

Sarah Moss

#5. Fiction is the enemy of history. Fiction makes us believe in structure, in beginnings and middles and endings, in tragedy and comedy. There is neither tragedy nor comedy in war, only disorder and harm.

Sarah Moss

#6. Suddenly, but not really. There is always a beginning.

Sarah Moss

#7. The American police had shot another child for being black and outside, and the child had died, there on the pavement in the company of his killers.

Sarah Moss

#8. It is simply not possible to live in a state of acute fear and shock for more than a couple of weeks, and so the mind finds a path, a story, a way onwards. Shock is by definition transient, even when the shocking thing is here to stay.

Sarah Moss

#9. It's only, he said, that one doesn't like to think of one's grandchildren facing greater disadvantages than one's children. Well stop voting Tory, you prick, Emma did not say.

Sarah Moss

#10. I dislike Tolkien, another Oxonian Old Norse obsessive, with his war games and made-up language in a world without women.

Sarah Moss

#11. Tables and beds, he thinks, eating and fucking: life.

Sarah Moss