Quotes from Laura Moriarty

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

This is how it is now. This is my life.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

This is how it is now. This is my life.

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

Schopenhauer writes about marriage. He says getting married is like grasping blind into a sack of snakes and hoping to find an eel.

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.

She was grateful life could be long.

I am supposed to be where I go.

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.

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.

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

I am supposed to be where I go." -Joseph

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

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

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.