Life & Wisdom Quote by Thylias Moss

Awareness, Moss suggests, is not a vibe; it is a bill that comes due. The line pivots on a hard bargain: to "notice" is to step out of the comfortable blur where harm can be dismissed as accidental, distant, or not yours. Moss compresses an entire ethics into that trade-off. The cost of noticing is not merely discomfort or sadness. It is "to become responsible" - a word that flips perception into obligation. Once you have truly seen something, you can no longer claim innocence through ignorance. Your moral alibi evaporates.

The syntax performs the pressure. "One must always" sounds like a commandment, but the phrase is immediately complicated by "even though", an admission that this mandate is not easy or clean. Moss isn't romanticizing attention as personal growth; she's warning that attention changes your legal and emotional standing in the world. The quote reads like a quiet rebuke to the modern habit of consuming suffering as content: the scroll that lets you witness everything while promising you owe nothing.

As a poet, Moss is writing in the shadow of American realities where invisibility is political: whose pain gets ignored, whose labor goes uncredited, whose danger is normalized. Noticing becomes a refusal to collaborate with that erasure. The subtext is blunt: if you can see it, you are already in it. Responsibility is not a heroic pose; it's the unavoidable consequence of clear sight.