Daily Inspiration Quote by Rick Moody

The line lands with the offhand precision of someone who knows exactly how ridiculous, and how revealing, this kind of sentence can sound. Moody’s “in fact” and “right now” perform casual credibility, like he’s shrugging while placing himself in one of America’s most pedigree-conscious rooms: Boston, the New England Historical Genealogical Library, the whole institutional apparatus built to turn family lore into documented status. The specificity is the point. He isn’t just researching; he’s doing “work,” a word that upgrades private obsession into something that resembles scholarship, labor, even art.

Tracing a lineage “back to the seventeenth century” is an ambition with cultural baggage. In the U.S., that era codes as pre-Revolutionary legitimacy: Puritans, settlers, founding-era proximity. The subtext hums with questions about what counts as an origin story and who gets to have one. Genealogy promises narrative control - a way to say, my life isn’t random; it’s archived. But it also flirts with a classed, regional idea of belonging, where documentation becomes a kind of moral passport.

Coming from a novelist, the quote doubles as a sly meta-commentary on craft. Fiction writers make family trees for a living; they build inherited motives, long shadows, generational scripts. Moody’s trip to the stacks reads like method acting for authorship: hunting for predecessors not only to find who he came from, but to thicken the story he can tell about himself. The sentence’s modest tone keeps it from sounding like bragging, yet it can’t quite hide the hunger underneath: to be locatable in history, not just alive in the present.