Sarah Moss Quotes & Sayings

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

Suddenly, you will stop, you and me and all of us. Your lungs will rest at last and the electric pulse in your pulse will vanish into the darkness from which it came.

Put your fingers in your ears, lay your head on the pillow, listen to the footsteps of your blood.

You are alive. — Sarah Moss

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

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

Suddenly, but not really. There is always a beginning. — Sarah Moss

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

I started to empty the dishwasher and then remembered that there was an alternative to my thoughts and turned on the radio. There had been more bombs in the places where there are bombs. Children had died. No one had started CPR and called an ambulance, no one had rushed to them with adrenaline and oxygen and a defibrillator, no one was piecing together what had happened. There had been bombs and children had died. — Sarah Moss

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

She had joined Amnesty International and Greenpeace and the Green Party. She said patriarchy and hegemony and neo-liberalism, several times a day. She put streaks of blue in her hair and enjoyed baiting her teachers by wearing mascara: but Miss, you're wearing makeup. But Sir, aren't you just inducting us into a world more interested in policing women's sexuality than giving us knowledge? — Sarah Moss

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

Tables and beds, he thinks, eating and fucking: life. — Sarah Moss

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

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

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