The Tidal Zone Quotes

“Stories have endings; that's why we tell them, for reassurance that there is meaning in our lives. But like a diagnosis, a story can become a prison, a straight road mapped out by the people who went before. Stories are not the truth.”
― Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone

“Suddenly, you will stop, you and me and all of us. Your lungs will rest at last and the electric pulse in your pulse will vanish into the darkness from which it came.

Put your fingers in your ears, lay your head on the pillow, listen to the footsteps of your blood.

You are alive.”
― Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone

“Fiction is the enemy of history. Fiction makes us believe in structure, in beginnings and middles and endings, in tragedy and comedy. There is neither tragedy nor comedy in war, only disorder and harm.”
― Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone

“I personally don't like depressing subjects, people say, as if mortality is a lifestyle choice, disease and violence and sorrow a matter of taste.”
― Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone

“May we forget. It's a pity that the things we learn in crisis are all to be found on fridge magnets and greeting cards: seize the day, savour the moment, tell your love— May we live long enough to despise clichés again, may we heal enough to take for granted sky and water and light, because the state of blind gratitude for breath and blood is not a position of intelligence.”
― Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone

“It is simply not possible to live in a state of acute fear and shock for more than a couple of weeks, and so the mind finds a path, a story, a way onwards. Shock is by definition transient, even when the shocking thing is here to stay.”
― Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone

“It's only, he said, that one doesn't like to think of one's grandchildren facing greater disadvantages than one's children. Well stop voting Tory, you prick, Emma did not say.”
― Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone

“Suddenly, but not really. There is always a beginning.”
― Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone

“look, mate, it’s a job, the making of cakes and the washing of sheets, the coordination of laundry with PE lessons, the handling of the Christmas shopping and the girls’ dental appointments, and the fact that your wife does it on top of her paid work without you noticing does not make you clever.”
― Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone

“I started to empty the dishwasher and then remembered that there was an alternative to my thoughts and turned on the radio. There had been more bombs in the places where there are bombs. Children had died. No one had started CPR and called an ambulance, no one had rushed to them with adrenaline and oxygen and a defibrillator, no one was piecing together what had happened. There had been bombs and children had died.”
― Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone

“There is a large overlap between ordinary families and those to whom terrible things have happened. It is possible, necessary, to be both.”
― Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone

“With every birth, a new death comes into being. With every love, a loss.”
― Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone

“The child was a girl, but the most important thing about her was that she was herself. She was someone new, someone who had not been before and so, like all babies, she was a revelation.”
― Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone

“looking as always for food and mischief”
― Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone

“He came in the end, as he must, to the other coast, over the state line and well north of where he'd thought he was going, to a place where the Pacific Ocean ended on a white beach under dark pines and there were mussel shells as big as his hand and driftwood logs taller than buildings, wider than a man's length. Swell that had been rising and running from the coast of Japan, from the other side of the planet, crashed day and night onto the sand below the group's cabins, as if he'd come at last to a place where he could hear the earth breathe. Even now, in August, it was cool here, the green breath of the old forest and the salt sea always on his face.”
― Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone

“Although try this: if you could know what is going to happen, if you could know the lives and deaths of your partner and your kids and yourself, if you could know their loves and losses, triumphs and failures, sicknesses and last moments, would you? No. You think you want a story, you think you want an ending, but you don't. You want life. You want disorder and ignorance and uncertainty.”
― Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone

“You keep going as everyone always keeps going, because an alternative has not been offered.”
― Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone