Here One Moment

by Liane Moriarty

If free will doesn’t exist, if all your decisions and actions are inevitable, are you still required to apologize for them?

they both belong to the same subspecies of slightly odd, deeply intense people. Ethan has always been drawn to people like this. He likes bouncing off the surfaces of their oddness, in the same way he prefers to play tennis against a hard-hitting player. It’s more difficult to cope with the soft lobs of normal, well-adjusted people.

Chaos theory is the idea that a tiny change now can result in a large change later.

There has always been a special kind of fury and contempt reserved for women perceived to have supernatural powers.

Don’t buy into this idea that you’ve only truly ‘lived’ if you’ve traveled. As if taking the same photos at the same tourist spots as everyone else is the only thing that counts as living.”

“I know it’s stupid to say this at my age, but I feel like I’m only just getting started.” “My mother used to say ‘La vita va veloce: this life goes fast, much faster than time.’ ”

(Almost half of all men who took part in a recent survey believed they could successfully land a commercial aircraft in an emergency. It’s their hubris that makes men both so adorable and exasperating, don’t you think?)

It’s interesting how a simple kind comment from a stranger can make you feel better.

Everyone loves a particular version of you and when that person is gone that version goes with them.

(It’s the answer to many a question: Just be you. It sounds easy, but it seems even icons struggle to be their iconic true selves.)

I could see she was the sort of person who went to galleries and museums and stopped in front of paintings to make intelligent remarks.

Curiosity is such an attractive quality.

She had always taken “absence of pain” as a right, not a privilege. It feels like a privilege now.

There is a flicker of a feeling she needs to investigate later.

Doesn’t everyone think about jumping when they’re up high? A friend told me it’s got a name: the ‘call of the void.’ ”

like many an unwilling party attendee before me, I discovered the solution to feeling awkward was to drink as much as possible, as quickly as possible. Not only did the awkwardness vanish but David much preferred me that way. Drinking improved my personality. I was not so uptight.

We preferred nonfiction, and when Jill told us fiction was “the lie through which we tell the truth” (she was quoting Albert Camus), we said truth is stranger than fiction (she told us we were quoting Mark Twain, and that wasn’t the point).

But that’s the thing about life: both your wildest dreams and your worst nightmares can come true.

then I thought: Right. Let’s get this grief thing done. You’ve done it before. Do it again. But experience makes no difference; you cannot project-manage grief.

talked about the belief that mathematical truths are discovered, not invented, because they already exist, which, if correct, means reality must extend beyond the physical world. We talked about the idea that math is a sense like sight and touch, and if that is true, well, then, was it also possible my mother possessed another sense that gave her the ability to access another reality? I wondered if my love of math and her love of the spiritual could therefore coalesce in a way far more beautiful and mysterious than my cynical belief that she used data and probability to make her predictions, no different from an actuarial table. And then we wondered if we were just stumbling our way toward God or enlightenment, or was that just a way of saying we didn’t know, and it was all so interesting,

It is only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on Earth and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up that we begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it were the only one we had. —Elisabeth Kübler-Ross