Top 40 Liz Moore Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “Some people do have trouble with Kensington, but to me the neighborhood itself has become like a relative, slightly problematic but dear in the old-fashioned way that that word is sometimes used, treasured, valuable to me.”

— Liz Moore

2. “But if I was self-conscious about my appearance, I was proud of my intelligence, which I thought of, in secret, as something that rested quietly inside me, a sleeping dragon guarding a store of wealth that no one, not even Gee, could take away. A weapon I would one day deploy to save us both: myself and my sister.”

— Liz Moore

3. “Is there confusion in the little isle? Let what is broken so remain. The Gods are hard to reconcile: ‘Tis hard to settle order once again. There is confusion worse than death, Trouble on trouble, pain on pain, Long labour unto aged breath, Sore task to hearts worn out by many wars And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars.”

— Liz Moore

4. “This must be the most important factor in your choice of a life partner,” he told Ada. “Who will most patiently and enthusiastically support your ambitions?”

— Liz Moore

5. “I tried hard to ignore the low noise that thrummed throughout my day, some tolling, cautionary bell. I wouldn’t listen. I wanted everything to stay as it was. I was more afraid of the truth than the lie. The truth would change the circumstances of my life. The lie was static. The lie was peaceful. I was happy with the lie.”

— Liz Moore

6. “This was the secret I learned that day: none of them want to be saved. They all want to sink backward toward the earth again, to be swallowed by the ground, to keep sleeping. There is hatred on their faces when they are roused from the dead.”

— Liz Moore

7. “I wouldn’t listen. I wanted everything to stay as it was. I was more afraid of the truth than the lie. The truth would change the circumstances of my life. The lie was static. The lie was peaceful. I was happy with the lie.”

— Liz Moore

8. “I have never enjoyed the feeling of anyone else worrying about me or being concerned for my well-being, preferring instead to give the impression that I am in all ways fine, and that I have everything under control. Largely, I believe this image to be an honest one.”

— Liz Moore

9. “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

10. “I’ve had a certain bad habit ever since I was a child. I duck what I can’t bring myself to acknowledge, turn away from anything that causes me to be ashamed, run away from it rather than addressing it. I am a coward, in this way.”

— Liz Moore

11. “The knowledge that there was once a person in the world who loved me more than anything.”

— Liz Moore

12. “In a moment of clarity, once, Kacey told me that time spent in addiction feels looped. Each morning brings with it the possibility of change, each evening the shame of failure. The only task becomes the seeking of the fix. Every dose is a parabola, low-high-low; and every day a series of these waves; and then the days themselves become chartable, according to how much time, in sum, the user spends in comfort or in pain; and then the months.”

— Liz Moore

13. “Virtual reality, she thought, was the unseen world. Or had the capacity to be. In fact, it could be said that all computer systems were such: universes that operated outside the realm of human experience, planets that spun continuously in some unseeable alternate stratosphere, present but undiscovered.”

— Liz Moore

14. “She read Walden out of sheer boredom and found herself annoyed by Thoreau: his self-regard, his tone of superiority, the way he doled out advice so obvious as to be insulting. Here was a rich person playing, thought Louise. There were poor people far more resourceful and self-sufficient than he was; they just had the grace and self-awareness not to brag about it.”

— Liz Moore

15. “People like them will seek a collective target almost automatically. People of our class, I mean. We were bred to do it. We’ve been doing it since birth.”

— Liz Moore

16. “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

17. “Ada could feel the tension between David and Liston. She knew, though she was young, what was causing it: it was Liston’s wish to protect her with honesty, and David’s to protect her – and himself – with optimism, wishfulness, some willful ignorance of his impending fate.”

— Liz Moore

18. “Delphine was ashamed, too, thought Alice; for the opposite reason that Alice was. For knowing too much, rather than too little. For a woman, neither was an acceptable way to be.”

— Liz Moore

19. “But the quickest way to make an attractive man ugly was to give him too much to drink. Drunk men frightened her. She had learned young how to coddle them, how to laugh just enough at their bad jokes to prevent them from feeling insulted, but not so much that her laughter egged them on. Coiled just below a surface of good humor lay their strength and their meanness, two guns waiting to go off.”

— Liz Moore

20. “Don’t write boys checks that you don’t want to cash.”

— Liz Moore

21. “Being humorless, she thought, was even worse than being dumb.”

— Liz Moore

22. “Only humans can hurt one another, Ada thought; only humans falter and betray one another with a stunning, fearsome frequency. As David’s family had done to him; as David had done to her. And Ada would do it too. She would fail other people throughout her life, inevitably, even those she loved best.”

— Liz Moore

23. “What will she do now, wonders Judy, if the Hewitts lose the camp? If the Van Laars cut them out entirely, as they’ll no doubt do, snapping the thin thread that has stretched for decades between the Hewitts and Peter the First? And she answers her question herself: They’ll be fine. The Hewitts – like Judy, like Louise Donnadieu, like Denny Hayes, even – don’t need to rely on anyone but themselves. It’s the Van Laars, and families like them, who have always depended on others.”

— Liz Moore

24. “People with promise, people dependent and depended upon, people loving and beloved, one after another, in a line, in a river, no fount and no outlet, a long bright river of departed souls.”

— Liz Moore

25. “How quickly, I reflected, peril could be followed by beauty in the wilderness, each forming a part of the other. – From Woodswoman by Anne LaBastille.”

— Liz Moore

26. “Every thirty seconds or so, call out for the boy. This, it turned out, was the most difficult part for Carl. For all the men. They were unaccustomed to raising their voices in this way, to calling out one person’s name repeatedly. As it turned out, the women were more willing to do so; and so it was their voices that echoed throughout the woods. All of them were mothers. All of them regularly set aside their innate sense of propriety to holler with abandon for their children.”

— Liz Moore

27. “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

28. “Once, while playing a game of Dictionary, Alice came across the word nonsecular, and this is the word that comes to mind when she thinks of the liminal space between life and death in which she encounters her son.”

— Liz Moore

29. “Rich people, thought Judy – she thought this then, and she thinks it now – generally become most enraged when they sense they’re about to be held accountable for their wrongs.”

— Liz Moore

30. “There was a particular brand of humor employed by twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls, especially when they weren’t in the presence of boys: it was at once disgusting and innocent, bawdy and naive. When it wasn’t being used for ill – when no one was its target – this type of humor delighted Louise. From the wall, she watched them quietly, fondly, recalling what it was like to be in this moment of life that was like a breath before speech, a last sweet pause before some great unveiling.”

— Liz Moore

31. “I’m just saying – when you hear hoofbeats, don’t look for a zebra.”

— Liz Moore

32. “Usually, she was gifted in the art of shutting up. Not today.”

— Liz Moore

33. “The warm fragile weight of her son. She pictured his bones inside him, suspending the rest of him with their careful architecture; the miniature lungs that lifted and lowered the back; the small limbs that twitched as he settled into deep sleep; the whole infant body somehow an impossibility in its scale, in its smell, in its composition, in the way it induced a sort of calm in her that – the conviction landed on her one day like an anvil – she would never again feel in her life.”

— Liz Moore

34. “For knowing too much, rather than too little. For a woman, neither was an acceptable way to be.”

— Liz Moore

35. “But for the most part, she was utterly content with her strange, satisfying existence: Ada and David together, always.”

— Liz Moore

36. “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

37. “It’s the Van Laars, and families like them, who have always depended on others.”

— Liz Moore

38. “She loved the most popular girls at her middle school – though revered might have been a better word, since a large part of her actually despised them. Still, she was fascinated by them, perhaps due to the fact that, physically, they were her opposite, and thus seemed somehow like specimens she wished to examine, at length, under a microscope.”

— Liz Moore

39. “We can do as we please, if we only learn not to care so much about what people think.”

— Liz Moore

40. “In the corner, Bear raised his arms to her as if he were a toddler who wanted to be held. It was unbearable – unbearable – to be kept from him.”

— Liz Moore

41. “As a parting gift, he gave Harold the key chain from his house keys, the ones that opened the gate to Hamilton Arms: it was a clover, a charm for luck. Its stem was a little drawer, into which, Harold later found, George had put a love note. Harold kept the clover for the rest of his life.”

— Liz Moore

42. “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

43. “But there’s a difference, I believe, between two consenting adults making a thoughtful transaction and the kind of bargain that happens on the Ave, where some of the women would do anything for anyone, where some of the women need a fix so badly that they can’t say no or yes.”

— Liz Moore

44. “About this last point, Peter agreed. He said this frequently, matter of factly, the way he said everything, as if he were in possession of no opinions, only facts.”

— Liz Moore

45. “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

46. “She wasn’t – frightened of him, exactly, though there had been one or two incidents that caused alarm. It was more that she had come to see herself nearly exclusively through his eyes, and therefore being in his good graces was the easiest way to achieve a sense of well-being.”

— Liz Moore