20 Quotes by Sarah Moss

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.

The stories told by numbers and research are quite different from the stories we tell ourselves and each other. This is not to say that either is wrong.

Lights blind you; there’s a lot you miss by gathering at the fireside.

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.

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.

Suddenly, but not really. There is always a beginning.

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.

Dad and the Prof were talking about fighting, the way men do when they’re really fighting about talking.

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.