20 Quotes by Sarah Moss

It was bright again, as if England had forgotten how to rain

we’re all enjoying thinking about how much where you come from shapes what you see when you leave. Home, I tell them, is the paper on which travel writes. Travel writers are always writing home.

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.

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.

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.

Window weather. It’s not charming, or wimpish, but a state of mind in which a fairly serious hope, that winter is over, that life is returning, is lost. It’s the antithesis of Easter.

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.

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

I didn’t then like the thought of my own bones, waiting inside me for their own eventual exposure.