Gravity Is the Thing Quotes

“Men speak in absolutes, women in uncertainties, and this often strikes us as a weakness in women, but it’s knowledge: a knowledge that we cannot know, not ever.”
― Jaclyn Moriarty, Gravity Is The Thing

“I suspected other people were better at living than me. Did others elbow their way through fog, rising out of it somedays, relief blending with terror at its return?”
― Jaclyn Moriarty, Gravity Is the Thing

“There’s no such thing as this baby, this toddler, this little person, because it’s quicksilver, there’s no such thing as anybody. We shouldn’t have children, it’s impossible, but if you want children, and you can’t have them, then that’s its own impossible. It’s impossible to lose them, but it happens, it happened to my mother, it’s happening all the time.”
― Jaclyn Moriarty, Gravity Is the Thing

“Popular self-help teaches you to ask for help, accept help, set boundaries, say no. So you ask for help and the person you ask politely refuses. Because he or she has learned to set boundaries and say no.”
― Jaclyn Moriarty, Gravity Is The Thing

“Later that night, my mother phoned and informed me: “We are designed to recover.” “I mean, I know not everybody does,” she added, “but that’s the design.” And she expressed irritation with the number of people who say you never recover from the loss of a child. “Of course, I’ll never stop missing him. Some days I feel like a cake tin, pieces of baking paper stuck in patches to the bottom. Or I’m an ice cube tray that somebody is twisting, and ice is clattering into the sink, and the sink is also my heart.” “These are good,” I said. “Unexpected metaphors.” “Or I’ll be in bed,” she continued, “thinking: break glass with hammer, and my chest is the glass.” “Uh-huh,” I said, understanding. “But often I’m happy,” she said. “You can be happy, Abigail.”
― Jaclyn Moriarty, Gravity Is the Thing

“We breathed in the happiness of stories still untold.”
― Jaclyn Moriarty, Gravity Is the Thing

“Death is ear-splitting, it's shattering with absence; over time, it's quieter.”
― Jaclyn Moriarty, Gravity Is the Thing

“Breathe in,” Wilbur said. “Be aware of your breath. Breathe out. Focus your awareness on your arms. Focus your awareness on your toes. Focus your awareness on Leonardo da Vinci, standing on a hill outside of Florence, locking all the secrets into codes, and studying birds.”
― Jaclyn Moriarty, Gravity Is the Thing

“All we need to know is that beauty is truth, said Keats, and I’m sorry to sound callous, but what he actually needed to know was the cure for his general malaise and for the illness that eventually killed him, aged twenty-five.”
― Jaclyn Moriarty, Gravity Is the Thing

“There are entire movements, many of them rooted in the wisdom of the ancients, many stolen, Westernized, and simplified from the East. It’s all right, though, social media will reduce them to a pithy pair of lines.”
― Jaclyn Moriarty, Gravity Is the Thing

“Hope is like a giant soap bubble, and you roll around inside it, smiling while it deflates, slowly, cruelly, until you’re walking around with this sticky consistency, wrapped across your flesh.”
― Jaclyn Moriarty, Gravity Is the Thing

“All we need to know is that beauty is truth, said Keats, and I’m sorry to sound callous, but what he actually needed to know was the cure for his general malaise and for the illness that eventually killed him, aged twenty-five. *”
― Jaclyn Moriarty, Gravity Is the Thing

“If the internet is a legal minefield, it’s also an ocean of buried treasure; you just have to dig in the right place.”
― Jaclyn Moriarty, Gravity Is the Thing

“If the internet is a legal minefield, it’s also an ocean of buried treasure; you just have to dig in the right place. Nights, Finnegan would find me in the study, clicking on links and comments.”
― Jaclyn Moriarty, Gravity Is the Thing

“If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody.”
― Jaclyn Moriarty, Gravity Is the Thing

“Trying to force Seneca’s approach: believe the worst and you will be prepared when it takes place; by believing the worst, he actually thought he was earning a happy surprise.”
― Jaclyn Moriarty, Gravity Is The Thing

“Maybe, by a certain age, we have all encountered some impossible loss, or at least the accumulation of small sufferings.”
― Jaclyn Moriarty, Gravity Is The Thing

“Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.”
― Jaclyn Moriarty, Gravity Is The Thing

“The first birthday is the key to identity.”
― Jaclyn Moriarty, Gravity Is The Thing