Here One Moment

by Liane Moriarty

The idea of determinism, he said, is that everything that happens, and every decision or action you make, is “causally inevitable.” Why? Because everything is caused by something else: a preceding action, event, or situation.

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

You never know what your last words are going to be, so try to choose them all wisely.

It’s just that my relationship with David Smith was based very much on desire. It was truly all that mattered. Desire can be powerful enough to sweep away everything in its path: your good sense, your Catholic upbringing, your plans for the next day. It was all I thought about. You may be at a stage in your life where you have forgotten this, and even the word “desire” might aggravate you.

understand that too. (But deep down you remember, don’t you? I bet you do.)

It’s a very particular time in your life, when someone you love is dying. The world doesn’t stop for you. We know this, but in our hearts we are shocked. We are like famous people who say: But don’t you know who I am? Except we want to say, But don’t you know what I am going through? How can you speak to me like that when my mother is dying? There are still red lights and rude people, long lines and lost keys. You can still stub your toe, and it will still hurt like the devil. The difference is that your reaction may be gargantuan. You may react with a rage-filled stream of profanity, the likes of which your aunt hasn’t heard since the war. You may scream in your car at a red light and scare small children. The dying person will not, by the way, always behave like a lovely dying person in a movie. She will not necessarily want to sit on the beach with a blanket wrapped around her thin body, looking wan and beautiful, her eyes wise and sad, a gentle breeze in her hair, while she makes profound remarks and looks at the sea. (I believe I may be describing a scene from the excellent, extremely sentimental movie Beaches.) She may in fact say, “Of course I don’t want to go to the beach, Cherry, I feel so sick, why would you suggest such an idiotic thing?” Your feelings can still be hurt by a dying person. A dying person can still be vain. Stupidly vain. A dying person can take pride in her thinness, point at her hipbones, and say, “Look how skinny I am!” as if it’s a nice bonus,...

How can you tell if an actuary is an extrovert? He looks at YOUR shoes when he talks to you!

What is the difference between an English actuary and an Italian actuary? An English actuary can tell you how many people are going to die next year. An Italian actuary can give you their names and addresses. That one is insulting to Italians who are not involved in organized crime, which is obviously the vast majority.

The four of us seemed to balance one another out, like a beautiful equation. Euler’s identity is considered the most beautiful equation in the world and is often compared to a Shakespearean sonnet, but a simpler mathematical analogy probably makes more sense. We were like a square. A square is mathematical perfection.

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

world fallacy, which is the erroneous belief that the world is fair. We are socialized to think that. It makes the world feel more predictable if we believe good behavior is rewarded and bad behavior punished. The problem is that we then subconsciously believe people who suffer must deserve it. It’s what allows us to look away, to turn the television off. People sometimes say that everything happens for a reason. No. No, it does not. There was no reason for these terrible things to happen together. No reason at all. They just did.

said, “I love Wednesdays too, Bridie.” And then I told her about Mum, and how she told my fortune all those years ago and said that one day a little girl would arrive on a plane just when I needed her the most and her name would begin with the letter B.

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