Top 100 Lorrie Moore Quotes
#1. Her parents had gone from a couple who would be different, who would be better than anyone, who were determined to be better than most, to a couple who would be different because they were worse.
Lorrie Moore
#2. She smiled at him, with longing. 'Where do you live,' she asked, 'and how do I get there?
Lorrie Moore
#3. John had dreamed so long and hard of this place that he had hoped it right out of existence. Probably no place in the world could withstand such an assault of human wishing.
Lorrie Moore
#4. You always say that," said Evan, "but then you go on your trips and vacations and then you settle back into things and then you're quiet for a while and then you say you're fine, you're busy, and then after a while you say you're going crazy again, and you start all over.
Lorrie Moore
#5. I want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.
Lorrie Moore
#6. But this is the kind of thing that fiction is: it's the unlivable life, the strange room tacked onto the house, the extra moon that is circling the earth unbeknownst to science.
Lorrie Moore
#7. Better to think of writing, of what one does, as an activity, rather than an identity to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun.
Lorrie Moore
#8. Although Kit and Rafe had met in the peace movement, marching, organizing, making no nukes signs, now they wanted to kill each other. They had become, also, a little pro-nuke.
Lorrie Moore
#9. To write a short story, you have to be able to stay up all night.
Lorrie Moore
#11. She would turn from him in bed, her hands under the pillow, the digital clock peeling back the old skins of numbers.
Lorrie Moore
#12. The affectionate farce I make of him ignores the ways I feel his lack of love for me. But we are managing.
Lorrie Moore
#13. This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.
Lorrie Moore
#14. Don't mistake a lack of sophistication for sweetness.
Lorrie Moore
#15. The key to marriage, she concluded, was just not to take the thing too personally.
Lorrie Moore
#16. I didn't want to, even in my imagination, even for a second, to conflate this sophisticated woman with my mother, a woman so frugal and clueless that she had once given me - to have! to know! to wear! - her stretch black lace underwear that had shrunk in the dryer, though I was only ten.
Lorrie Moore
#17. She hated money! though she knew it was like blood and you needed it. Still, it was also like blood in that she often couldn't stand the sight of it.
Lorrie Moore
#18. It is unacceptable, all the stunned and anxious missing a person is asked to endure in life. It is not to be endured, not really.
Lorrie Moore
#19. Personally I've never put much store by honesty- I mean how can you trust a word whose first letter you don't even pronounce
Lorrie Moore
#20. So much urgent and lifelike love went rumbling around underground and died there, never got expressed at all, so let some errant inconvenient attraction have its way. There was so little time
Lorrie Moore
#21. You emptied the top rack of the dishwasher but not the bottom, so the clean dishes have gotten all mixed up with the dirty ones - and now you want to have sex?
Lorrie Moore
#22. I'm a little harsh. When people say, 'I have writers block. What do you suggest?' I say, 'If you can't write, don't write. No one needs your writing. Don't torture yourself.'
Lorrie Moore
#23. At home in Dellacrosse my place in the world of college and Troy and incipient adulthood dissolved and I became an unseemly collection of jostling former selves. Snarkiness streaked through my voice, or sullenness drove me behind a closed door for hours at a time.
Lorrie Moore
#24. While my scarcely controlled rage flew from my mouth in sentences I hoped would be, perhaps not then but perhaps later, like knives to her brain.
Lorrie Moore
#26. On Fridays there were fish fries or boils at which they served "lawyers" (burbot or eelpout), so-called because their hearts were in their butts.
Lorrie Moore
#27. She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.
Lorrie Moore
#28. Philosophers are good at parties but not for cleaning up after.
Lorrie Moore
#29. She was wearing an old summer dress as a nightgown, but in the mornings it could work as a dress again, if you just tossed a cardigan over it and put on shoes. In this risky manner, she knew, insanity could encroach.
Lorrie Moore
#30. No matter what terror the earth could produce - winds, seas - a person could produce the same, lived with the same, lived with all that mixed-up nature swirling inside, every bit. There was nothing as complex in the world - no flower or stone - as a single hello from a human being.
Lorrie Moore
#31. Her voice was husky, vibrating, slightly flat, coming in just under each note like a saucer under a cup.
Lorrie Moore
#32. As a feminist you mustn't blame the other woman," a neighbor told her. "As a feminist I request that you no longer speak to me," Kit replied.)
Lorrie Moore
#33. After four movies, three concerts, and two-and-a-half museums, you sleep with him. It seems the right number of cultural events.
Lorrie Moore
#34. The catalog showed a man sleeping peacefully while his model-wife read a book in soft but focused light. In real life, however, the light was so intense that the same man would have had to wear sunglasses.
Lorrie Moore
#35. It's a form of terrorism not to bomb this town.
Lorrie Moore
#36. If you record the world honestly, there's no way people can stop being funny. A lot of fiction writing doesn't get that idea, as if to acknowledge it would trivialize the story or trivialize human nature, when in fact human nature is reduced and falsified if the comic aspects are not included.
Lorrie Moore
#37. She recognized the panic at even a moment's boredom that all these piles contained, as well as the unreasonable hopefulness regarding time.
Lorrie Moore
#38. We curl up on the couch together, under a blanket, whisper I love you, I missed you, confusing tenses I think.
Lorrie Moore
#39. Rather than a teaching tool, I think a novel is more of a witnessing entity. A witnessing entity? What is that? I just want the reader to step in and experience it as a story.
Lorrie Moore
#40. It reminded me of how children always thought too big; how the world tackled and chiseled them to keep them safe.
Lorrie Moore
#41. I've been falsely accused of drawing too much from real life. But I am a petty thief - I take little things. And, I mean, I can hardly write 10 words before I start to make things up. I start to invent, because that's what I want to do. I'm running away to an invented place.
Lorrie Moore
#42. I want to create something that doesn't exist exactly in the real world, but exists in a kind of parallel to the real world.
Lorrie Moore
#43. These were the sorts of notions that had been raised in all my classes, and we had chased them round and round like dogs maddened by their tails.
Lorrie Moore
#44. I do have people in mind when I write. I don't know precisely who they are, however, or how many of them there are.
Lorrie Moore
#45. Love drains you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight. You are like a house slowly losing its electricity, the fans slowing, the lights dimming and flickering; the clocks stop and go and stop.
Lorrie Moore
#46. I tried not to think of my one excursion to Whole Foods, over a year ago, where I found myself paralyzed by all the special food for special people, whose special murmurings seemed to be saying, Out of my way! I want a Tofurkey!
Lorrie Moore
#47. A match made in heaven - where do you get those? That's what I want to know!
Lorrie Moore
#48. For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.
Lorrie Moore
#49. A funny line can never exist on its own. It needs to be surrounded by mood and circumstances.
Lorrie Moore
#50. This was love, I supposed, and eventually I would come to know it. Someday it would choose me and I would come to know its spell, for long stretches and short, two times, maybe three, and then quite probably it would choose me never again.
Lorrie Moore
#51. I can't believe I just asked you to hold my hand,' said Ira, but Mike had already taken it.
Lorrie Moore
#52. Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself.
Lorrie Moore
#53. I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it.
Lorrie Moore
#54. You know, I'm just a very boring, not very funny person in person. I don't feel pressured to be otherwise.
Lorrie Moore
#55. it seemed one could just say are you serious? for the rest of existence and it would never be unjustified and would always have to be answered and so would keep the conversation going
Lorrie Moore
#56. Things, however, rarely happened the way you understood them. Mostly they just sort of drove up alongside what you thought was the case and then moved randomly down some other way.
Lorrie Moore
#57. The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father.' And you know what they say? 'I could never do that!'
Lorrie Moore
#58. She wore a lot of gray-green corduroy. She had been under the impression that it brought out her eyes, those shy stars.
Lorrie Moore
#59. My father was the child of academics and was probably destined to become an academic himself but vetoed that idea. Bailed, dropped out of graduate school and just went to work for an insurance company. But the house was full of books and music and all of that.
Lorrie Moore
#60. I count too heavily on birthdays, though I know I shouldn't. Inevitably I begin to assess my life by them, figure out how I'm doing by how many people remember; it's like the old fantasy of attending your own funeral: You get to see who your friends are, get to see who shows up.
Lorrie Moore
#61. They looked at her quizzically, came at her with assumptions, presumptions, what they believed was intimate knowledge of her. She felt unarmed, by comparison; disadvantaged.
Lorrie Moore
#62. From Charades: when she was younger she was a frustrated mother, so she is pleased when her children act as is they don't remember
Lorrie Moore
#63. What do I do when writing isn't going well? Well, I don't write - which is symptom, cure, and cause. And then sometimes I just tell myself, as I'm writing, "I'll fix it later." And sometimes it's true, I do.
Lorrie Moore
#64. Tone was all. Gift wrap was all. Perfect the wrap, and you could put whatever you wanted in the box. You could put firecrackers. You could put dog shit.
Lorrie Moore
#65. That's not the one you were thinking of?"
"No." There was accusation in her voice. "Mine was different,
Lorrie Moore
#66. As the most recently arrived to earthly life, children can seem in lingering possession of some heavenly lidless eye.
Lorrie Moore
#67. I said nothing. If she wasn't careful, everyone would rush out of her life, life out of a burning building.
Lorrie Moore
#68. A lie to the faithless is merely a conversation in their language.
Lorrie Moore
#69. I've come to realize that life, while being everything, is also strangely not much. Except when the light shines on it a different way and then you realize it's a lot after all!
Lorrie Moore
#70. When I was in graduate school, I had a teacher who said to me, 'Women writers should marry somebody who thinks writing is cute. Because if they really realised what writing was, they would run a mile.'
Lorrie Moore
#71. Oh, the beautiful smiles of the insane. Soon, he was sure, there would be a study that showed that the mentally ill were actually more attractive than other people. Dating proved it!
Lorrie Moore
#72. Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real.
Lorrie Moore
#74. I had seen this exact same expression and movement before - where? In the future I would come to know that look as the beginning of the end of love - the death of a man's trying. It read as Haughty Fatigue. Like the name of a stripper.
Lorrie Moore
#75. Farmers aren't rich. They have land but no money." Actually, my father didn't even have that much land. He had once stood on the porch and flung his arms out and said, "Someday kids, all this will be yours." But his knuckles hit the porch supports. Even the porch wasn't that big.
Lorrie Moore
#76. In an attempt at extroversion, she had worn a tunic with large slices of watermelon depicted on the front. What had she been thinking of?
Lorrie Moore
#77. I'm surrounded by music; I always was when I was growing up and continue to be. And I love music. And when I imagine a fictional world, I imagine there's music in it for those people, too.
Lorrie Moore
#78. Editing is just ongoing. I don't count drafts, or know what would fully constitute a draft. But I try to fix as I go. And there's always more to fix.
Lorrie Moore
#79. When she packed up to leave, she knew that she was saying goodbye to something important, which was not that bad, in a way, because it meant that at least you had said hello to it to begin with ...
Lorrie Moore
#81. Perhaps everyone had their own way of preparing to die. Life got you ready.
Lorrie Moore
#82. It's two against one out here; we just keep taking turns.
Lorrie Moore
#83. Mostly, however, he had books about love. He believed in studying his own heart this way.
Lorrie Moore
#84. I wished for eternal and intriguing muteness. I would be the Mysterious Dumb Girl, the Enigmatic Elf. The human voice no longer interested me.
Lorrie Moore
#85. The speech she made was done in the back, alone, like little shoes cobbled by an elf: spider is to web as weaver is to blank. That one was hers. She was proud of that. Also, blank is to heartache as forest is to bench. But
Lorrie Moore
#86. Anyone who's read all of Proust plus The Man withour Qualities is bound t be missing out on a few other titles.
Lorrie Moore
#87. Even at midnight the city groans in the heat. We have had no rain for quite a while. The traffic sounds below ride the night air in waves of trigonometry, the cosine of a siren, the tangent of a sigh, a system, an axis, a logic to this chaos, yes.
Lorrie Moore
#88. Get a Job, she shouted silently to God. Get a real Job.
Lorrie Moore
#89. Adults are living increasingly as children: completely in their imaginations. Reading Harry Potter while every newspaper in the country goes out of business. They know so little that is real.
Lorrie Moore
#90. Shopping for clothes is like masturbation - everyone does it, but it isn't very interesting and therefore should be done alone, in an embarrassed fashion, and never be the topic of party conversation.
Lorrie Moore
#91. When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet," she writes. "Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet.
Lorrie Moore
#92. She was afraid, and the afraid, she realized, sought opportunities for bravery in love.
Lorrie Moore
#93. There were moments bristling with deadness, when she looked out at her life and went, "What?" Or worse, feeling interrupted and tired, "Wha - ?
Lorrie Moore
#94. Make a list of all the lovers you've ever had.
Warren Lasher
Ed "Rubberhead" Catapano
Charles Deats or Keats
Alfonse
Tuck it in your pocket. Leave it lying around, conspicuously. Somehow you lose it. Make "mislaid" jokes to yourself. Make another list.
Lorrie Moore
#96. he had had some eye work done: a lift to remove the puff and bloat; he would rather look startled and insane than look fifty-six.
Lorrie Moore
#97. Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.
Lorrie Moore
#98. You can exclude the excluded middle, but when you ride through, on your way to a lonely and more certain place, out the window you'll see everyone you've ever known living there.
Lorrie Moore
#99. The night before, a whole day could have shape and design. But when it was upon you, it could vanish tragically to air.
Lorrie Moore
#100. If God Speaks Through Burning Bushes, Let's Burn Bush and Listen to What God Says.
Lorrie Moore
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