Sarah Moss > Quotes

“I shivered. Of course, that was the whole point of the re-enactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts, learning to walk the land as they walked it two thousand years ago, to tend our fire as they tended theirs and hope that some of their thoughts, their way of understanding the world, would follow the dance of muscle and bone. To do it properly, I thought, we would almost have to absent ourselves from ourselves, leaving our actions, our re-enactions, to those no longer there. Who are the ghosts again, us or our dead? Maybe they imagined us first, maybe we were conjured out of the deep past by other minds.”
― Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall

“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, The Tidal Zone

“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, The Tidal Zone

“I didn't then like the thought of my own bones, waiting inside me for their own eventual exposure.”
― Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall

“Actually, said Molly, it’s no harder for girls to pee than boys, the problem isn’t biology, it’s men’s fear of women’s bodies. If we were allowed to pull our knickers down and squat by a wall the way you’re allowed to get your dick out and piss up the wall there wouldn’t be a problem, it’s just the way you all act as if a vagina will come and eat you if it’s out without a muzzle.”
― Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall

“The plant began to topple and I found myself feeling guiltier about killing it than I had about gutting the rabbits. The whole of life, I thought, is doing harm, we live by killing, as if there were any being of which that is not the case.”
― Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall

“Lights blind you; there's a lot you miss by gathering at the fireside.”
― Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall

“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, The Tidal Zone

“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 Tidal Zone

“The northern sky, dark over the sea, is mottled with green that spreads like spilt paint… The green and white reach towards each other and then lunge away like opposing magnets forced together. I tread water, and watch.”
― Sarah Moss, Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland

“Dad and the Prof were talking about fighting, the way men do when they're really fighting about talking.”
― Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall

“It was bright again, as if England had forgotten how to rain”
― Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall

“Who are the ghosts again, us or our dead? Maybe they imagined us first, maybe we were conjured out of the deep past by other minds.”
― Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall

“Would I do it again, understanding as I do now and didn’t then, that failure at motherhood is for life and beyond, that everything that happens to my children and my children’s children is my fault? That my meanness and bad temper are going to trickle into the future like nuclear waste into the Irish Sea? No. Not because I don’t love my children - everyone loves their children, child abusers love their children - but because I don’t love motherhood and you don’t find that out until it’s too late. Love is not enough, when it comes to children. Bad luck.”
― Sarah Moss, Night Waking

“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, The Tidal Zone

“Suddenly, but not really. There is always a beginning.”
― Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone

“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, The Tidal Zone

“May we forget. It's a pity that the things we learn in crisis are all to be found on fridge magnets and greeting cards: seize the day, savour the moment, tell your love— May we live long enough to despise clichés again, may we heal enough to take for granted sky and water and light, because the state of blind gratitude for breath and blood is not a position of intelligence.”
― Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone

“getting married is like voting in that whatever you choose the outcome will be at best mildly unsatisfactory four years down the line.”
― Sarah Moss, Summerwater

“There must be a better reason to travel, a better way of travelling, than the hoarding of sights your friends haven’t seen.”
― Sarah Moss, Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland

“And the waves, of course, have almost gone here in the shelter of the island and the peninsula where even today there are cars glinting wet through the trees, people desperate enough to walk in the rain or some of them just seem to drive to the end of the road and park and sit there, newspapers and tea from a flask and it makes him itch everywhere at once just thinking of it, people sitting in parked cars, the windows steaming up, waiting for minutes to pass, for their lives to drip away.”
― Sarah Moss, Summerwater

“I'm always trying to do what dead people tell me. And specially when I'm making a replica, spending days looking at and feeling and listening to some prehistoric object, I'm kind of trying to think their thoughts too. I mean, it would make sense, wouldn't it, that when I really concentrate on the spaces between decorative dots or the exact tension of a twist, my mind's doing what their minds did while my hands do what their hands did.”
― Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall

“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, The Tidal Zone

“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, Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland

“look, mate, it’s a job, the making of cakes and the washing of sheets, the coordination of laundry with PE lessons, the handling of the Christmas shopping and the girls’ dental appointments, and the fact that your wife does it on top of her paid work without you noticing does not make you clever.”
― Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone

“With every birth, a new death comes into being. With every love, a loss.”
― Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone

“All the parenting books, eighteen-century and modern, warn against appearing to take your children's irrational anxieties too seriously. I have, myself, yet to experience a fear assuaged by the brisk application of common sense.”
― Sarah Moss, Night Waking

“Foreigner, útlendingur. Ausländer. I have joined the Faculty of Foreign Languages. British people of my generation don't use that world, certainly not as casually as Icelanders. 'Foreigner' is a word I associate with the Daily Mail and the British National Party, a term used only by people who understand the world in binary terms of Us and Them.”
― Sarah Moss, Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland

“I'm still broken, aren't I? I guess I'm beginning to realise that I won't get over it. Death doesn't get better. Maybe life does.”
― Sarah Moss, Cold Earth

“Haven't you been listening, people don't bother to hurt what they don't love. To sacrifice it.”
― Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall