addison > addison's Quotes

“Do you ever worry that being born into money has stunted us?” Alice blanched. “I don’t mean anything by it,” said Delphine. “It’s just—lately I’ve been wondering whether having all of our material needs met from birth has been a positive aspect of our lives. It seems to me it may have resulted in some absence of yearning or striving in us. The quest, I like to call it. When one’s parents or grandparents have already quested and conquered, what is there for subsequent generations to do?”
― Liz Moore, The God of the Woods

“This is one of the few sheer pleasures Louise knows in life: the near-otherworldly feeling of touching another human's body with your own body in a way that, for the first time, transcends mere friendliness. These are the times in her life that Louise has felt most acutely the animal nature of her humanity, and therefore they have been the most comforting. To be a human is complex, and often painful; to be an animal is comfortingly simple and good.”
― Liz Moore, The God of the Woods

“We can do as we please, if we only learn not to care so much about what people think.”
― Liz Moore, The God of the Woods

“Kissing someone - someone you want to kiss, I mean - is like living inside the best song you ever heard. It's the same feeling.”
― Liz Moore, The God of the Woods

“It was wonderful, thought Tracy, having friends like these, who seemed to see the parts of yourself you worked hardest to hide, and bring them into the light and celebrate them with a sort of tender ribbing that uplifted more than it put down.”
― Liz Moore, The God of the Woods

“How many times in her life has she said yes to a boy or a man just because it was the easiest thing to do? How many times has she let a man take what he wanted, instead of taking something for herself?”
― Liz Moore, The God of the Woods

“If she believed in a God, it was in one who functioned something like Louise in this moment: rooting for her charges from afar, mourning alongside them when they were rejected, celebrating every small victory that came their way. She noticed the lonely ones, the ones at the edge of the crowd; she felt in her heart a sort of wild affection for them, wanted to go to them, to stand next to them and pull them tightly to her side; and yet she also knew that to intervene in this way would disrupt something sacred that—at twelve and thirteen and fourteen years old—they were learning about themselves and the world. And this, too, was how she thought of God.”
― Liz Moore, The God of the Woods

“It's the Van Laars, and families like them, who have always depended on others.”
― Liz Moore, The God of the Woods

“To panic, said T.J., was to make an enemy of the forest. To stay calm was to be its friend.”
― Liz Moore, The God of the Woods

“But nobody asked her, and so she kept these wishes quiet, writing them only in journals, summoning them to the forefront of her mind whenever a birthday or a well or a star presented her with a formal opportunity to make them known to the universe.”
― Liz Moore, The God of the Woods

“Later on, the ten seconds that pass between sight and inference will serve to her as evidence that time is a human construct, that it can slow or accelerate in the presence of emotion, of chemicals in the blood.”
― Liz Moore, The God of the Woods