Home > Author > Sarah Moss
41 " 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
42 " It is the logic of amateur cake decorators and sock knitters across the land, that production of any kind is by definition a moral way of spending time. As if more stuff is what the world needs. "
43 " We would all rather be descended from victims, whom we confuse with the innocent, which is inconvenient because it is aggressors who tend to survive. "
― Sarah Moss
44 " It is no wonder women's careers collapse after childbirth; the image of ourselves exposed and whimpering on hospital beds reappears in our minds as we ascend the podium or open the meeting. "
45 " Dad and I find ash, I said, up on the moor tops at home, people say they want to be scattered there as if scattering is making something go away entirely and then we sit down with our sandwiches and realise we're in the middle of someone's granny, of course they always choose the places you'd stop for lunch, somewhere on the top of a ridge with a nice view. "
― Sarah Moss , Ghost Wall
46 " Here, then, and now: homecoming. The lightening of her very bones, the slowing of her dancing heart as the air of this place fills her lungs and her blood. The wind off the sea, the watery colours of a summer night in the far west where nightfall is postponed almost until morning. "
― Sarah Moss , Signs for Lost Children
47 " … although I found I could see well enough until I came within sight of the fire. Light blinds you; there’s a lot you miss by gathering at the fireside. "
48 " Now if we go along this track we’ll come to the road and then it’s all of ten minutes to the shop, only we’ll look right prats if anyone sees us. We look right prats whether anyone sees us or not, I said, and they’ve probably heard all about it by now anyway, round here. "
49 " I understand why people prefer to be inside on a wet night, but I want to follow the year’s cycle out here on the shore, feel the rain and wind as well as turning my face to the sun at midnight and standing shivering under the aurora. "
― Sarah Moss , Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland
50 " Icelandic drivers don’t indicate, Pétur once told me, because they don’t see why anyone else needs to know where they’re going. "
51 " 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. "
52 " He once caught Marcus spitting over the side, and though he told him off he could see why he'd done it. There's something about fatal drops that makes you want to launch a bit of yourself, just a mouthful, over the edge. "
― Sarah Moss , Summerwater
53 " 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. "
54 " There must be a better reason to travel, a better way of travelling, than the hoarding of sights your friends haven’t seen. "
55 " I find that fiction and I read it, often with pleasure and sometimes with admiration, but I look for books of all kinds that are not ‘relatable’ to me, books that are windows more than mirrors. If fiction has a moral purpose – it doesn’t have to have a moral purpose – it’s in letting us see our shared world from places other than our own and through eyes other than our own, giving us versions of human experience and history and geography that are not at all ‘relatable. "