Here One Moment Quotes

“Everyone loves a particular version of you, and when that person is gone, that version goes with them.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“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”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“You never know what your last words are going to be, so try to choose them all wisely.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“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.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“You won’t necessarily win against fate, but you should at least put up a fight.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“A parent’s love is surely strong enough to occasionally crash through the barrier dividing heaven and earth.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“La vita va veloce: this life goes fast, much faster than time.’ ”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“When you live with someone who dislikes you in a mostly unspecified way, you begin to dislike yourself too, especially if you are someone, like me, whose self esteem, at least regarding my personality, has never been high. A different person, a stronger person, would not have allowed her sense of self to be blown away like grains of sand in the brisk winds of Perth.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“When you live with someone you love, you share all your most trivial concerns: what time should we eat, what time should we leave, what should we watch, I thought they said that rug would be delivered by now, we’ve run out of black pepper, do I have time for a shower, can you buy dishwashing soap, are you tired, are you hungry, did you see the news about that politician, that atrocity, that accident, that disaster, you won’t believe what I just read, I’m going to bed, listen to this, it’s so funny, are you eating the rest of that, I’m calling about that rug, what time will you be home, I’ll meet you there, I’ll see you when I’m back, will you have eaten, I won’t have eaten, we made the right decision about that rug…on and on it goes, an endless daily stream of tiny decisions and opinions and thoughts shared, and you don’t even know it’s keeping you alive.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“and 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.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“You can’t always choose your future. Not in a world of risk and uncertainty. No matter what the self-help gurus tell you. You can only attempt to guide it in the right direction, like a willful horse, but accept there will be times when it will gallop off in a direction not of your choosing. No one can tell you what lies ahead with one hundred percent accuracy. If your doctor tells you ninety-nine out of one hundred people die of your disease, you most likely will die, but you might also be the one who beats the odds, and if you do, you will believe yourself special and blessed, and your loved ones will believe the fervency of their prayers for you paid dividends, but it’s just math. It’s all just math.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“But that’s the thing about life: both your wildest dreams and your worst nightmares can come true.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“I thought: What did I do to deserve these tragedies? This is too much. This is grossly unfair. I still think that, sometimes, even though I know full well I am exemplifying the just-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.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“Some people lead charmed lives and think it is all due to them. They stand, like ship captains, proud and tall, feet apart, one hand loosely on the helm of their destinies. They are often charming, charismatic people because why wouldn’t they be? They have no need of fortune tellers. They have only ever faced clear seas and easy choices. When the iceberg looms, when something finally happens that is outside of their control, they are outraged. They whip their eyes to the left, to the right, looking for someone to blame. Try not to marry that sort of person.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“If free will doesn’t exist, if all your decisions and actions are
inevitable, are you still required to apologize for them?”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“But you could never say it all and you could never say it enough.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“I told him about how our second form teacher, Miss Crane, drew the tiniest chalk mark on the blackboard and explained that a point is “zero-dimensional,” meaning it doesn’t actually exist. But once you have two points—two nonexistent points—you can fill in the space between with lots and lots of points, and you get a line, which has length, so it’s now one dimension, which you could argue means it does now exist. Miss Crane dotted her chalk against the board, over and over, in a straight line, demonstrating how a series of nothings could become something. (Actually, you could also argue the line still doesn’t exist, it’s just a concept, but I’d learned by then not to add caveats to everything I said. This was, after all, a love letter.) I told Jack how I leaned forward that day in class as if I stood with my toes hanging over the very precipice of enlightenment. In my naivete, I believed Miss Crane was about to explain something that explained everything. Something I felt I almost already knew, but could not articulate; it was related to infinity and God, the ocean and space, the universe and my dad. Of course, I did not achieve enlightenment in my geometry lesson. Miss Crane put the chalk down and told us to take out our compasses and protractors. I told Jack that when I was with him, I felt like I was close to understanding what I had nearly understood that day.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“Math, by the way, is a language, I would argue a beautiful one, and it’s the only universal language there is, because it’s the same all over the world.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“She has never been loved by someone who is happy just to see her happy.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“The other night I dreamed I saw my parents dancing and they turned and saw me, and held out their arms. I ran to them, fast as the wind, like a child.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“Those were her last words. They were excellent last words, Mum. Well done. An hour later, she took a breath. We waited. There were no more breaths.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“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'm going through? How can you speak to me like that when my mother is dying?”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“She had recently lost her father and she said (according to the article, which may or may not have been fact-checked) that her first thought was this: No one would ever love her like that again.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“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.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“know full well I am exemplifying the just-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.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“Women in the 1980s won’t be enduring that kind of sexist behavior.” If you worked in an office in the eighties, please take this moment for a hollow laugh.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“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).”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“It was not technically my fault, either, although it has occurred to me that if Kayla had been driving faster that day, not so cautiously, she might have been at a different intersection at the moment a forty-year-old man, more than three times over the legal alcohol limit at ten in the morning, with two previous drunk-driving convictions, drove straight through a red light at over one hundred kilometers an hour. I wish this thought had not occurred to me and I hope it has not occurred to her parents.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“Chaos theory is the idea that a tiny change now can result in a large change later. It was first observed by a meteorologist modeling a weather sequence. He mistakenly rounded his variables to three decimal places instead of six, and was shocked to discover this tiny change transformed his entire pattern of simulated weather over a two-month period, thereby proving even the most insignificant change in the atmosphere may have a dramatic effect on the weather.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“People prefer jokes to history, so here are some actuarial jokes: Old actuaries never die; they just get broken down by age and sex. I find that quite amusing. You may not.”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment