Laura Moriarty Quotes & Sayings

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

She was grateful life could be long. — Laura Moriarty

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

...I am supposed to be where I go."
-Joseph — Laura Moriarty

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

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

This is how it is now. This is my life. — Laura Moriarty

They were still out on the sidewalk of West Eighty-sixth Street, the taxi pulling way, when Louise put down her travel bag, raised both arms and declared herself in love with New York City. 'It's exactly as I imagined it!' She let her arms fall and looked out at the street, at the honking, halting parade of cars, headlights bright in the dusking air. She turned to Cora with glistening eyes. 'I've always known it, my whole life. This is where I'm meant to be. — Laura Moriarty

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

One way to remain
unfinished is to stop.
the other is to go on. — Laura Moriarty

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

Perhaps all the difficulties of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering in the early years wouldn't — Laura Moriarty

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

Maybe children just want whatever it is they don't get. And then they grow up and give their children what they wanted, be it silence or information, affection or independence
so that child, in turn, craves something else. With every generation the pendulum swings from opposite to opposite, stillness and peace so elusive. — Laura Moriarty

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

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

This life is mine because of good luck. And because I reached out and took it. — Laura Moriarty

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

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

compassion is the basis of all morality. — Laura Moriarty

She wondered when her daughter would realise that for the most part, people weren't that different. Young and old, male or female, pretty much everyone she knew wanted the same things: The wanted to feel peace in their hearts, they wanted a life without turmoil, they wanted to be happy. The difference, she thought, was that most young people seemed to think that those things lay somewhere in the future. While most older people believed that they lay in the past. — Laura Moriarty

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

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

Shooting stars are not really stars at all but meteorites, burning their way through our atmosphere, sometimes landing in the oceans and in the middle of farms ... you could make wishes on them if you like, but they are really just pieces of rock falling down from the sky, and they could land on your head and kill you just as you look up to make a wish. Really, they're just rocks. They don't care about your wishes at all. — Laura Moriarty

Worrying was painful ... but compared to the alternative, a privilege — Laura Moriarty

While I was writing the book, I went to see Louise Brooks's most famous film, Pandora's Box, at the Tivoli in Kansas City, and it was a lovely experience. You can watch old silent films on DVD or even on YouTube, but it was a different feeling watching her up on the big screen, seeing the film the way people saw it all those years ago. — Laura Moriarty

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

He was right to insist. If they put her on a train, — Laura Moriarty

Pale eyes, and a pointy nose. A gingham bonnet covered her hair. "Hello," she said to Cora. Both the man and the woman crouched low, their faces level with hers. Cora could not cough or pretend to be slow: one of the agents was right there, watching. The man asked her name, and she told him. He asked her age, and she said she didn't know, but that she'd just lost her first tooth. Both the man and the woman laughed as if Cora had said something terribly funny, as if she were one of the children singing the Jesus song, trying hard to be cute. She gave them a hard look, but they continued to smile. The man looked at the woman. The — Laura Moriarty

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

You could push people away, past their limits, even accidentally, and then it was just too late to get them back — Laura Moriarty

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

I know that sometimes when you are really worried about something, it ends up not being nearly as bad as you think it will be, and you get to be relieved that you were just being silly, worrying so much over nothing. But sometimes it is just the opposite. It can happen that whatever you are worried about will be even worse than you could have possibly imagined, and you find that you were right to be worried, and even that, maybe, you weren't worried enough. — Laura Moriarty

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

My mother says that when Mrs. Rowley is mean, which is generally the case, it is really because she is just unhappy, and who could blame her with a husband like that ... She says this is really the only reason people are ever mean
they have something hurting inside of them, a claw of unhappiness scratching at their hearts, and it hurts them so much that sometimes they have to push it right out of their mouths to scratch someone else, just to give themselves a rest, a moment of relief. — Laura Moriarty

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

The thing that got me about the Orphan Trains was that the experiences were so varied. Some of the kids went from neglect and hunger in New York to loving farm families who couldn't wait to fatten them up, who gave them medical care, an education, affection. And some of the kids became the victims of terrible cruelty, and more hunger, and more neglect - it all depended on who adopted them off of the train. — Laura Moriarty