Moskowitz Quotes & Sayings

Just wanted to let you know I got in all right. And also that my chest hurts as if I MAY BE DYING, because I accidentally left my heart on your kitchen counter. I hate when that happens. — Hannah Moskowitz

At the Hospital, everyone thinks about dying.And I'd never been much for romanticizing death-especially not suicide. I'd always been a fan of staying alive.
After all, you basically do all you can not to die. All the time. The search for immortality isn't just from storybooks. every day you do it. You buckle your seat-belt, you take vitamin supplements, look both was before you cross the street. And you really think your doing all you can. Bullshit. We can lift weights for fucking hours and we're still going to die. — Hannah Moskowitz

My life is just something that happened to me. — Hannah Moskowitz

I ignore people who need me and latch on to people who don't. I dive into every other world except my own just because I want something more glamorous than my real life. I do destructive shit so a stupid hypocritical fish will like me.
I fall for fish instead of girls. — Hannah Moskowitz

There's no moral issue for me. I did the best science I could. I was struggling to survive and didn't have the luxury of being a moral creature. — Howard Moskowitz

The truth is
loving someone isn't a period
it's a semicolon
and the choice you make is what comes on the other side — Hannah Moskowitz

There's a big difference between hating someone in peace and hating someone during war. — Hannah Moskowitz

I should have touched him. I missed my chance to find out what he was. — Hannah Moskowitz

Adolescence is a twentieth-century invention most parents approach with dread and look back on with the relief of survivors. — Faye Moskowitz

I wish we would all just fall apart so I wouldn't have to listen to the downfall happen, so slowly, so painfully. — Hannah Moskowitz

There is no going back, so fuck you, universe. — Hannah Moskowitz

Pathetic, huh?" He learned that word
from me.
"Yeah. It's like the opposite of a fish,
right? — Hannah Moskowitz

I guess I haven't made it clear how I feel about Charlotte. Well, she puts my heart in a microwave and watches as it warms up and explodes. When I'm around her, my blood runs hot and thick. It's beautiful.
You could say there's nothing special about her. You could make the case.
But, really, she's special because nobody else can do the microwave thing. — Hannah Moskowitz

I'm expanded!" I grab my belly flab and shake it at her. — Hannah Moskowitz

I think this is the part where we stop pretending we're not going to see each other again. — Hannah Moskowitz

I love the creative, whole-foods recipes in But I Could Never Go Vegan! Kristy Turner has heard all the excuses and has a response for each. It's true, no life is complete without the occasional calzone-but stuff 'em with Kristy's Buffalo Cauliflower and Cashew Blue Cheese and you can have calzones and be vegan too. Get ready for your taste buds to explode. — Isa Chandra Moskowitz

I could totally be a ...
whatever."
"Sailor?"
"On a boat?"
"Yep."
"Yeah." He'll sigh all wistfully. "I could be a sailor. But I'm too busy being a fish. — Hannah Moskowitz

I say, "Good job, buddy," and his face is like I've just fixed the whole world. — Hannah Moskowitz

I hate when people do this. I hate when people hide their cards to feel secret and strong. That's no way of dealing with anything. — Hannah Moskowitz

He has lungs and a heart and he ... he is just telling himself over and over again that he is all fish because that's what you wanted him to be. — Hannah Moskowitz

Using high math and computations, he engineers them, with one goal in mind: to create the biggest crave. "People say, 'I crave chocolate,' " Moskowitz told me. "But why do we crave chocolate, or chips? And how do you get people to crave these and other foods? — Michael Moss

We sat perfectly still in the dim light as the wolf approached closer, head cocked, mouth closed, and ears semi-erect. With these signs of both curiosity and trepidation, it took a step forward and then backed off a ways, then took a few steps forward again. It lifted its nose and sniffed intently, and finally stopped at about eight feet away. For a moment all three of us were perfectly still, wondering what was going to happen next. — David Moskowitz

His tragic flaw is that he is a walking tragedy, and his smile makes me feel alive. — Hannah Moskowitz

You are no longer responsible. You are no longer allowed to give a shit. Nobody can need you ever again. Go. — Hannah Moskowitz

Wall and Melzack showed how a chronic injury not only makes the cells in the pain system fire more easily but can also cause our pain maps to enlarge their "receptive field" (the area of the body's surface that they map for), so that we begin to feel pain over a larger area of our body's surface. This was happening to Moskowitz, whose neck pain was spreading to both sides of his neck. Wall and Melzack also showed that as maps enlarge, pain signals in one map can "spill" into adjacent pain maps. Then we may develop referred pain, when we are hurt in one body part but feel the pain in another, some distance away. — Norman Doidge

They scoot away from each other as soon as I open the door, like they're afraid that their cuddling will bruise my eyes. — Hannah Moskowitz

Sometimes I hate the things I am allowed to do. — Hannah Moskowitz

He shakes his head. "They're hunting the Enkis. I know that. And I get that. But ... we're special."
"The reason they want them is because they're special. Anchovies aren't going to cure anyone."
"That's not the special I mean." He catches another fish and hugs it to his chest.
I'm trying to be gentle. "They're only special to you because they're yours."
"I could say the same thing about that cute kid you were holding."
Well, shit. — Hannah Moskowitz

It's not disgusting. Books are disgusting."
"I like books. I thought you liked books."
"Let's be honest, Rudy, books are pornography for brains. — Hannah Moskowitz

She is still learning how wars keep score. — Hannah Moskowitz

I'm happy for the kid and everything, but how the fuck does Lio get a friend before me? I live here.
'I told you I could do it ' Lio IMs me. I want to rip out that smiley's eyes. — Hannah Moskowitz

The mind knows not what the tongue wants. — Howard Moskowitz

Am I four years old? All I do is cry and say things are stupid.
I'm stupid. — Hannah Moskowitz

How's everything going, Jonah? This question is enough to piss me off. I hate counselors ... I have Naomi. I don't need this crap. — Hannah Moskowitz

He'd kill one to save me, but not to save himself. Just like I'd risk Dylan's life for him but not for me. It makes us a little horrible. — Hannah Moskowitz

I don't tell him about how I have to leave my family organism, break out firmly and finally. I don't tell him that I'm a parasite, and I'm ruining them. That my functionality is tearing them to pieces. — Hannah Moskowitz

You're absolved," I tell him.
He brings his eyes back up to mine. There's no fucking way he knows what that word means. That's a word I dream someone will say to me.
So I put it in his language. "You're free. — Hannah Moskowitz

My eyes are darting to all the places my magazines are hidden. I feel like an idiot sometimes for having printed evidence. My friends look at stuff on their phones like it's their job. Don't get me wrong, I've looked, and there's some alright stuff online, but I prefer the magazines. I guess I'm a retro sort of man. Call me classy. — Hannah Moskowitz

Charlotte is a prism for my life. Without her, my existence looks pale and bleak and somewhere near the middle of the suck-meter. But around her, I see clearly that my life isn't made up of anything mediocre, but instead is some combination of the amazing and the dreadful - my brother who adores me, my parents who want what's best for me, my brother who's dying, my parents who won't understand me. It's not gray at all; it's too painfully colorful and fantastic and awful for me to see without her help. — Hannah Moskowitz

There was a time-a lonely, lonely time-when salads were a pale and limp affair, relegated to the side of your plate, practically weeping. I think those dark days were also known as the '80s. -p.11 — Isa Chandra Moskowitz

If this were a fairy tale, this would be the part where the fishboy appears and Diana shoots him through the heart. Because he is a tragic hero, he's our fucking Gatsby, and he lived for his fish and he has to die for his fish. He would never let my fake authority, condoning his abandonment, making up rules about what's okay just to save his life, convince him to give up his family. He would never leave.
He would know that without him, none of us will be as good. Me, without a friend; and the fish, without a brother; and the island, without a story; and Diana, without her something real, we will all be a little bit less than we were before we knew him.
So he wouldn't leave. Not until I could come with him. And I have never been less able to leave than I am now.
But this isn't a fairy tale, and he doesn't appear. We stand here for a long time.
He really left.
Because it was all that we could do. — Hannah Moskowitz

I think when we sleep, the world belongs to everyone still awake. Which means a shitload of the world belongs to Craig.
~Lio — Hannah Moskowitz

My adolescence progressed normally: enough misery to keep the death wish my usual state, an occasional high to keep me from actually taking the gas-pipe. — Faye Moskowitz

...It is just not hard to love where I am when where I am is here. — Hannah Moskowitz

Camus-boy, you're always going to be the same you, just older. It's not like there's a moment when you wake up and go, Shit, I'm grown-up, I don't feel like myself anymore.'
I don't tell him, but this is the scariest fucking thing I've ever heard in my life. Being grown-up should feel like a big transition. It can't be something that, despite my best efforts, I've been drifting closer and closer to every summer. It needs to be a shock. I need to know at what point to stop holding on. And that moment will suck, and probably every moment after that will suck, but at least I'll know that everything that came before really was valid. I really was young and innocent. I wasn't fooling myself. — Hannah Moskowitz

My last girlfriend at home was Gabrielle. We were together for only a month before I left. I pretty much knew by the time we kissed for the first time that I was leaving soon. That's probably why I kissed her so hard that I bruised my lip against her teeth. I felt like I could get every bit of me inside of her, if I tried hard enough. I don't know. — Hannah Moskowitz

What's love when you're too fucked up to feel it right?
I think it's a weapon. — Hannah Moskowitz

Her eyes are huge and humid. — Hannah Moskowitz

It is so much more beautiful than any polar bears in Alaska. Becaues I am here and he is mine and forever is as long as we want it to be.
The rest, as they say, is history. — Hannah Moskowitz

They hold all their flaws between their bodies and cradle them with each kiss. — Hannah Moskowitz

And I know, by Noah's face, that even though he knew it, he didn't believe it, even though we all knew it, we were all holding on, somehow, hoping they'd keep trying, that they could just keep on living and fighting. We trusted them to do that. — Hannah Moskowitz

And fuck it, because that was seriously fucking fantastic. — Hannah Moskowitz

Break a body, grow a better body. The worse you're hurt, the stronger you get. — Hannah Moskowitz

I wish we could get away from our fish. — Hannah Moskowitz

It's just something the tightropers used to say," she says. "At first we thought they were mocking us - if one of got a little extra food, they'd tell us, 'someone is looking out for you,' but then we started noticing they'd say it to each other. If one of the generals' small sons fell and didn't get hurt - 'someone is looking out for you.'"
Beckan is confused. "Who's looking out for you?"
"I think someone you met once or twice who you didn't know was important," she says. "You just passed by them and had no idea they were secretly taking care of you. Maybe they don't know either. — Hannah Moskowitz

I like books. I thought you liked books."
"Let's be honest, Rudy, books are pornography for brains. All that subtext and bullshit and hidden imagery. — Hannah Moskowitz

I don't want to die, but I wish waking up every morning didn't feel like such a fuck-you every single time. — Hannah Moskowitz

I'm a Miami girl. I'm not meant to be in anything under eighty degrees, ever. Shut — Hannah Moskowitz

Moskowitz became a world leader in the use of neuroplasticity for treating pain only after making some discoveries while treating himself. A — Norman Doidge

A few innocent people!" my father says. "A few people were shot for absolutely no reason except for where they happened to be."
But ... but, no, I'm calling bullshit, because entire lives are determined by where we happen to be. It's the only reason we care about the cities we care about. God, it's the only reason we fall in love. It's where you happen to be. — Hannah Moskowitz

Sixteen-year-old guys smell like deodorant and fast food. Then you turn seventeen and you get fresh. — Hannah Moskowitz

Don't ever let anyone tell you that college is for smart people. College eats smart people alive. — Hannah Moskowitz

So once the zookeeper realized it was the monkeys who stole the bananas, he knew there was only one way he'd be able to get them back."
"How?" I whispered. My throat was so sore.
"Don't talk. He had to beat them in shuffleboard, of course."
"What?"
"I said don't talk. Monkeys love shuffleboard."
He used a page from a homework assignment he'd failed and a stack of quarters to make a shuffleboard court. I watched the monkeys and the zookeepers have their showdown while I sipped the last of my applejuice.
"Need more?" Graham asked me without looking up, when my straw skidded against the dry bottom of the box.
"Uh uh."
"You're supposed to drink juice."
"I just drank some."
"More, though."
I shook my head.
"Drink more juice or the monkeys are going to kill you. The only thing they love more than shuffleboard is beating up dehydrated sick boys. — Hannah Moskowitz

If silence could break bones, I would shatter right now, into pieces of stomachache and blueprints and desperation. — Hannah Moskowitz

Be confident because the odds are in your favor.' He clears his throat, like talking this much hurts him. 'Not because you're a special snowflake. — Hannah Moskowitz

There's so much about girls I don't understand. I don't know how I'm old enough to kiss them but not old enough to talk to them. — Hannah Moskowitz

I want to tell her not to speak, want to say it, but her lips are on mine again and I taste me and I taste her and I don't taste what we're saying and I don't taste Noah. I taste Camus - I owe to such evenings the idea I have of innocence. — Hannah Moskowitz

We're totally different people from when we first met, but I still love her and she loves me, after all this time.

And this weekend I'm going to meet her in person. — Hannah Moskowitz

I think once you start going to therapy three times a week, you've made some sort of terrible transition. I think that's the difference between "a little fucked up," in a concerned endearing tone and "fucked up" with raised eyebrows and a slow head nod. — Hannah Moskowitz

There has to be a way. I didn't die in that cave, and Dylan didn't die when he was two, and Teeth didn't die in the shrimp boat, because there is always a way. And I'm going to find it. — Hannah Moskowitz

Christmas was a miserable time for a Jewish child in those days, and I still recall the feeling ... Decades later, I still feel left out at Christmas, but I sing the carols anyway. You might recognize me if you ever heard me. I'm the one who sings, 'La-la, the la-la is born. — Faye Moskowitz

There is something disorderly about the death of a young person. In a universe disturbed by so much over which we have no control, an untimely tragedy rattles the teeth of our already shaken confidence. We want to domesticate death, fight it on our own turf, in familiar rooms with shades drawn evenly, top sheets turned back, and a circle of hushed voices closing in. — Faye Moskowitz

I am tough for a reason and it is to fucking destroy the music. I dance hard. — Hannah Moskowitz

Craig, he says, in that tone that's like, I'm one step away from middle-naming you. — Hannah Moskowitz

The hipster narrative about gentrification isn't necessarily inaccurate - young people are indeed moving to cities and opening craft breweries and wearing tight clothing - but it is misleading in its myopia. Someone who learned about gentrification solely through newspaper articles might come away believing that gentrification is just the culmination of several hundred thousand people's individual wills to open coffee shops and cute boutiques, grow mustaches and buy records. But those are the signs of gentrification, not its causes. As — Peter Moskowitz

If my friends or my girlfriend back home saw who I've turned into, I don't think they'd recognize me. And I think that's okay with me. — Hannah Moskowitz

When you're grieving, the times you're happy are so much more tragic than the times that you aren't. Because being happy feels fake and it feels temporary and it feels meaningless. And hating being happy is a shitty way to live. — Hannah Moskowitz

It's not just like that. I can't just swim away."
"Why not?"
"I'm afraid I'll drown." He looks up and gives the world's smallest smile. He takes a deep breath with those lungs. "I'm afraid I'll drown. — Hannah Moskowitz

He says, "But it is really whatever, you know? You've saved me way more times. And we call ourselves friends."
It doesn't matter what we call ourselves, really. "You already saved me," I say.
"That was nothing."
"I'm not talking about the cave."
He wrinkles his nose.
"That first day," I say, "When you got up on the rocks to flirt with a human boy."
He smiles big, with all his ground-down teeth shining. — Hannah Moskowitz

There's something about a boy who isn't allowed to wander off. There's something about a boy in a sky who has limits. — Hannah Moskowitz

That which does not kill us makes us stronger," Jesse deadpans.
"Exactly. Exactly."
Self-improvement through adversity... it isn't bullshit. Exhibit A: my little brother. I can see every muscle in his stomach and shoulders. — Hannah Moskowitz

Shit, boy. Look at me. Do they have me right now? Are you tying me up and hitting me and ... whatever? Did you trap me?"
"I ... " I shake my head.
"And do I look free? — Hannah Moskowitz

Jewish Christmas' - that's what my gentile friends called Chanukah when I was growing up in Michigan in the thirties and forties. Anachronistic, yes, but they had a point. Observing the dietary laws of separating milk and meat dishes was far easier for the handful of Jewish families in our little town than getting through December without mixing the two holidays. — Faye Moskowitz

India said, 'But Mrs. Moskowitz, it just won't work. I still have to find a proper salaried position. I have to cover my expenses. Pay my rent.'
'You will stay with us.'
'Thank you. Truly. But it would be impossible.'
Mrs. Moskowitz reached across the table. She covered India's hand with her own. 'With all respect, my dear India,' she said, 'I look to God to tell me what is possible. Not to you. — Jennifer Donnelly

I'm bored of this. I want to hear about you. Favorite color. Go."
I laugh. "Green."
"I'm green!"
"Fuck yeah you are."
"Why are you laughing? Isn't this what friends do?"
"Interrogate each other?"
"What? Uh, sure. I don't know what that means. But yes. — Hannah Moskowitz

Soon we're both frowning hard at the paperwork. "Middle name?" Noah says. "Does Gideon even have a middle name?"
"I don't know"
Noah turns to me and says, "Do you have a middle name?" his glare implying that, if I do, this whole thing is somehow my fault.
"I ... have no idea."
"Primary language spoken at home." Noah makes a face. "What does this mean? Our primary language? Gideon's? That's sort of why we're here ... "
"Um, it's under family, so I'm guessing ours?"
"Well ... " Noah lowers his pen. The paperwork has defeated him. "What's our primary language?"
"English? ASL? Physical affection?"
"Food?" Noah says.
"Food's a good guess."
He picks up the pen. "I'm writing food, comma passive aggressive."
"Good call. — Hannah Moskowitz

You only get so many chances to be destroyed. Got to make the most of them. — Hannah Moskowitz

I close my eyes and listen to the ocean.
I'm thinking about sailing, to England or maybe France. The way the wind would feel on my face and the sound of his voice screaming my name through his laughter. The waves would crash like applause. God, I remember when I used to be afraid of the ocean. — Hannah Moskowitz

Even though Graham and I went back to arguing and stealing socks and hiding each other's toothbrushes in the litter box, I didn't forget that Graham didn't think I needed a best friend, because either it meant he thought I was cool enough to handle everything alone or - and this was what I hoped - it meant that he was my best friend, quietly, forever, no matter what.
I mean, after all, whose skates had I been wearing? — Hannah Moskowitz

Dad laughs. "You want to take a break? Go play with them?"
The problem is I'm sixteen, almost seventeen, and I don't want to play with them as much as I want to want to play with them. Maybe this feeling is what Noah's been running from. — Hannah Moskowitz

Hellos are harder than good-byes — Hannah Moskowitz

There is no perfect spaghetti sauce. There are perfect spaghetti sauces. — Howard Moskowitz

I don't think those who die are any better than those who stay alive. They just look better. They can't mess anything up anymore. — Hannah Moskowitz

I just want to talk to her and I want her to talk to me, and I want her to light up when she sees me, and — Hannah Moskowitz

Make sure you're not expecting cute. This isn't Looking For Alaska. — Hannah Moskowitz

Without Melinda, you'd have no Camus."
I exhale. "I know." I know it to my fucking bones. — Hannah Moskowitz

I still grieve for the words unsaid. Something terrible happens when we stop the mouths of the dying before they are dead. A silence grows up between us then, profounder than the grave. If we force the dying to go speechless, the stone dropped into the well will fall forever before the answering splash is heard. — Faye Moskowitz

You're broken, and you're fixed. And you're better. — Hannah Moskowitz

Will coos, "Jo."
I pretend he's saying my name. I pretend he's calling me back. — Hannah Moskowitz

For who will testify, who will accurately describe our lives if we do not do it ourselves? — Faye Moskowitz