Life & Wisdom Quote by Elizabeth Moon

There’s a quiet rebellion in admitting you can get wrecked by math without being good at it. Elizabeth Moon punctures the prestige economy that usually surrounds numbers: you’re supposed to either “have a math brain” or keep your distance. She offers a third posture, more human and more honest: math as a source of awe, frustration, tenderness, even grief, regardless of mastery.

The intent feels defensive and liberating at once. “Very emotional” signals intensity, but “although I’m not that good at it” anticipates the gatekeeper’s smirk. Moon preemptively disarms the cultural reflex that treats emotion as evidence of incompetence and competence as the only ticket to feeling. The subtext is that math isn’t just a tool; it’s an encounter. You can be moved by an elegant proof the way you’re moved by a sentence, even if you can’t reproduce it. You can also be emotional in the messier sense: shame from classroom sorting, anger at being told you’re “not a math person,” or longing for a fluency you never got.

Context matters because Moon is a working novelist, a profession that’s routinely cast as the opposite of STEM. In that old binary, writers “do words” and mathematicians “do truth.” Her line smudges the boundary. It’s also a small manifesto about permission: you don’t need credentials to care. In a culture that rewards optimization and expertise, Moon’s confession insists on a different metric of value: attachment. That’s where creativity actually starts.