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

Lorrie Moore Quotes #7761
#2. She knew that the world was not created to speak just to her, and yet, as with her son, sometimes things did.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #8381
#3. Unless you have a life of great importance, regrets are stupid, crumpled-up tickets to a circus that has already left town.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #13475
#4. She smiled at him, with longing. 'Where do you live,' she asked, 'and how do I get there?

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #16983
#5. Bucks, doe - thank God everything boils down to money, I always say."
"During mating season the doe constructs a bed for herself, and then she urinates all around the outside of it. That's how she gets her mate."
"So that's it," murmured Odette. "I was always peeing in the bed.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #20656
#6. Amber was not shy. If she had been shy, not one of us would be at Perkins right now.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #30840
#7. 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

Lorrie Moore Quotes #39720
#8. A smile, a weird one, nestled in his mouth like an egg.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #46698
#9. Which is it," she asked. "Is it CLIToris or clotORis?"
I didn't know. Why didn't I know? "It may depend on which you have," I said.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #47475
#10. 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

Lorrie Moore Quotes #47635
#11. I want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #51090
#12. 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

Lorrie Moore Quotes #56990
#13. 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

Lorrie Moore Quotes #77097
#14. 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

Lorrie Moore Quotes #79647
#15. No matter what terror or loveliness 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.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #83562
#16. You chose love like a belief, a faith, a place, a box for one's heart to knock against like a spook in the house.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #91740
#17. Sometimes it seemed that she and rudy were two people attempting to tango, sweating and trying, long after the orchestra had grown tired, long after everyone else had gone home.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #96784
#18. All the world's a stage we're going through.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #105250
#19. This ceremony of approval was a charade - everything had been decided before we got here - and as with all charades it was wanly ebullient, necessary, and thin.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #107971
#20. To write a short story, you have to be able to stay up all night.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #137878
#21. I had never feared insomnia before
like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #138409
#22. No wine," she said. "It leads to cheese.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #139537
#23. I've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #141580
#24. How quickly bodies came to love each other, promise themselves to each other always, without asking permission. From the mind! If only she could give up her mind, let her heart swell, inflamed, her brain stepping out for whole days, whole seasons, her work shrinking to limericks.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #147895
#25. I grew up with 'Life' magazine on the coffee table, Life cereal on the breakfast table, and the game of Life on the card table. People were just so happy to be alive, I guess.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #170963
#26. I wondered about the half-life of regret.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #172165
#27. She would turn from him in bed, her hands under the pillow, the digital clock peeling back the old skins of numbers.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #188302
#28. I was realising that all new feelings from here on in would probably be bad ones. Surprises would no longer be good.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #196321
#29. The affectionate farce I make of him ignores the ways I feel his lack of love for me. But we are managing.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #197485
#30. This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #198944
#31. This is not a restaurant. Restaurants serve different things from this.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #199432
#32. A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #215834
#33. If we were still English we'd be drinking more and driving on the wrong side of the road - pretty much what people do on the Fourth of July anyway.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #218111
#34. The compulsion to read and write - and it seems to me it should be, even must be, a compulsion - is a bit of mental wiring the species has selected, over time, in order, as the life span increases, to keep us interested in ourselves.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #219430
#35. Some people get their books on the best-seller list and then they count the number of weeks, and I just never want to live that way.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #220752
#36. Philosophize: you are a mistress, part of a great hysterical you mean historical tradition.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #230826
#37. Don't mistake a lack of sophistication for sweetness.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #230979
#38. Through college she had been a feminist - basically: she shaved her legs, but just not often enough, she liked to say.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #248562
#39. He calls you occasionally at the office to ask how you are. You doodle numbers and curlicues on the corners of Rolodex cards. Fiddle with your Phi Beta Kappa key. Stare out the window. You always, always, say: Fine.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #249080
#40. If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #250974
#41. The key to marriage, she concluded, was just not to take the thing too personally.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #258698
#42. I looked in vain for LaRoue, my cruelty toward her now in me like a splinter, where it would sit for years in my helpless memory, the skin growing around; what else can memory do? It can do nothing; It pretends to eat the shrapnel of your acts, yet it cannot swallow or chew.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #264640
#43. 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

Lorrie Moore Quotes #274613
#44. This is Quilty's audition ritual: whenever he feels it is time for it, he calls upon himself to audition for love. He has no script, no reliable sense of stage, just a faceful of his heart's own greasepaint and a relentless need for applause.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #279423
#45. I've never been to a dinner party where everyone at the dinner table didn't say something funny.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #291750
#46. 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

Lorrie Moore Quotes #294257
#47. You are unhappy because you believe in such a thing as happy.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #308321
#48. It would be a combination of comfort and surprise an audience might appreciate.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #310537
#49. I missed him. Love, I realized, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #311571
#50. But it would be like going to Heaven and not finding any of your friends there. Her life would go all beatific and empty in the eyes.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #312860
#51. The later-afternoon air of our exhalations hung in brief clouds before us. The thought balloon of my own breath said, "How have I found myself here?" It was not a theological question. It was one of transportation and neurology.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #315183
#52. There is something comforting, thinks Mack, in embracing someone the same size as you.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #319786
#53. This was my modest dream come true: unambitious flight. The kind that never even got high enough for a view.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #326104
#54. 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

Lorrie Moore Quotes #330455
#55. People will do anything, anything, for a really nice laugh,

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #334307
#56. 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

Lorrie Moore Quotes #338501
#57. 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

Lorrie Moore Quotes #339794
#58. 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

Lorrie Moore Quotes #342076
#59. I'm going to marry you till you puke.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #343305
#60. 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

Lorrie Moore Quotes #352557
#61. A novel is a daily labor over a period of years. A novel is a job. But a story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #352769
#62. 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

Lorrie Moore Quotes #353559
#63. Don't make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #357198
#64. 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

Lorrie Moore Quotes #366321
#65. They looked like frogs who'd been kissed and kissed roughly, yet stayed frogs.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #372802
#66. This danish is too sweetish to finish.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #376708
#67. (Such a life)engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #378513
#68. I cried for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sent out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are true, you do!

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #380791
#69. Most things good for writing are bad for life.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #385591
#70. If I retain any freshness of approach, it's by going slowly having long intervals between finished projects.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #391620
#71. 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

Lorrie Moore Quotes #403922
#72. For driving, a January thaw was always preferable to actual ice, but when it was over things froze more treacherously than before. And in its melting and condensing the roadside snow turned to clumps reminiscent of black-spotted cauliflower. Better never to have thawed.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #407526
#73. I always do the wrong. I do the wrong thing so much that the times I actually do the right thing stand out so brightly in my memory that I forget I always do the wrong thing.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #411462
#74. She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #411698
#75. The whole idea that people have a clue as to how the world works, is just a piece of laughable metaphysical colonialism perpetrated upon the wild country of time.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #413801
#76. Philosophers are good at parties but not for cleaning up after.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #421041
#77. The whiskey was going down sweet. That was what happened after a while, with no meal to assist - it had to do the food work on its own.
"There. We talked about death."
"That's talking about death?

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #421321
#78. I don't sit down to write a funny story. Every single thing I sit down to write is meant to be sad.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #429348
#79. 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

Lorrie Moore Quotes #441660
#80. It was strange, this toxic little vein, strange to stand above it, looking down at night, in a dangerous neighborhood, as if they were in love and entitled to such adventures.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #457331
#81. We don't do that in New York," rasped Odette. She cleared her throat.
"No?" Pinky smiled and put his hand on her thigh.
"No, it's, um, the cash machines. You just ... you wait at them. Forever. Your whole life you're just always" - her hand sliced the air - "there.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #460431
#82. No matter that you anticipate a thing; you get so used to it as part of the future that its actuality, its arrival, its force and presence, startles you, takes you by surprise, as would a ghost suddenly appearing in the room wearing familiar perfume and boots.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #460957
#83. 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

Lorrie Moore Quotes #461080
#84. I felt nothing like a horse, whose instincts I knew were to run and run. I had mostly in life tried to stand still like a glob of coral so as not to be spotted by sharks. But now I had crawled out onto land and was somehow already a horse.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #470927
#85. But I keep thinking love should be like a tree. You look at trees and they've got bumps and scars from tumors, infestations, what have you, but they're still growing. Despite the bumps and bruises, they're--straight.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #473474
#86. Some of the writers I admire who seem very, very funny and very emotional to me can develop a closeness with the reader without giving too much of themselves away. Lorrie Moore comes to mind, as does David Sedaris. When they write, the reader thinks that they're being trusted as a friend.

Sloane Crosley

Lorrie Moore Quotes #474958
#87. I love plays. Even bad ones. I like the fact that actual live, breathing people are standing before you in tense situations that you are not personally responsible for.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #476120
#88. We were in dialogue that was about something other than what we were saying.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #476909
#89. Her voice was husky, vibrating, slightly flat, coming in just under each note like a saucer under a cup.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #478604
#90. 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

Lorrie Moore Quotes #482497
#91. 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

Lorrie Moore Quotes #483348
#92. It had started to worry me that if I wasn't careful my meekness could become a habit, a tic, something hardwired that my mannerisms would continue to express throughout my life regardless of my efforts - the way a drunk who, though in the wagon, still staggers and slurs like a drunk.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #484162
#93. 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

Lorrie Moore Quotes #486992
#94. I am stealing more and more money. I keep it in my top drawer beneath my underwear, along with my diaphragm and lipstick and switchblade - these are things a woman needs

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #494060
#95. Her body was a mix of thin and plump, her skin lined and unlined, in that rounding-the-corner-to-fifty way. Age and youth, he chanted silently, youth and age, sing their songs on the very same stage.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #495113
#96. I always feel that the book I'm working on is my last book.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #498712
#97. Everything one reads is nourishment of some sort - good food or junk food - and one assumes it all goes in and has its way with your brain cells.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #501729
#98. Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #534799
#99. She tried to smile warmly but wondered if she looked "fakey," something Ariel sometimes accused her of. Ariel had said. "It's like you're trying to be happy out of a book." Millie owned several books about trying to be happy.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #540133
#100. This is a Hieronymous Bosch of facts and figures and blood and graphs.

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes #545382

Famous Authors

Popular Topics

Scroll to Top