Heft Quotes

“I feel like people are only really dead once you stop learning about them. This is why it is important to me to keep learning about my mother, and what she wanted, and what her life meant, what she meant by the life she led. Then she will be alive, somehow, and her wish for me will have come true. My vow is to learn more about her. To see her as she saw herself.”
― Liz Moore, Heft

“This is the strongest I have ever wanted a family. Other people to worry with. I am the only person worrying for her and it feels to me like this diminishes her odds of recovery. To have many people praying for you suddenly seems like a necessary thing and I consider telling the woman next to me what is happening, if only to have another person thinking about my Mom.”
― Liz Moore, Heft

“We talk for a very long time and I ask her if it gets easier and she says not really, just different. A different duller kind of hurt, the kind that doesn't surprise you anymore.
I ask what her parent were like when it happened and she says they have never been the same.”
― Liz Moore, Heft

“Here is what I have always thought: that people, when they eat, are very dear. The eager lips, the flapping jaws, the trembling release of control-the guilty glances at one’s companions or at strangers. The focus, the great focus of eating. The pleasure in it. I remember-when I went out more-I remember watching people in restaurants. People who ate alone, lost in the pleasure of it, O the pleasure of it. Digging for food in the bottoms of their bowls, guarding their fork, bringing the food to their mouths. Staring off into some middle distance while chewing. Thinking of things known only to them. To watch others eat is a thing of joy to me. & it is the only time I can forgive myself for what I have become.”
― Liz Moore, Heft

“I would remind myself of how many people there were like me, & how many people fall into the despair of loneliness, every day it happens, I would say, every day someone loses his connection to the world & then becomes the noble hermit, becomes connected to himself, the snake eating its tail, & then he must look steadily toward the lonely oversoul for help, he must or he will die. And then he becomes like I am, and the oversoul grows and expands lovingly and generously, and welcomes him as a member of its secret club. All of the people in the world who are lonely or sick or very sad.”
― Liz Moore, Heft

“The title of the book refers to many things, among them addiction. I have this idea that all of us on earth are carrying around a great weight, and each of our burdens is different but painful. Finding someone—a family member, a romantic love, a friend—who will help us to carry this burden is a great gift, and I think it’s what all of the characters in the book are trying to do.”
― Liz Moore, Heft