Lorrie Moore Quotes

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Later I would come to believe that erotic ties were all a spell, a temporary psychosis, even a kind of violence, or at least they coexisted with these states. I noted that criminals as well as the insane tended to give off a palpable, vibrating allure, a kind of animal magnetism that kept them loved by someone. How else could they survive at all? Someone had to hide them from the authorities! Hence the necessity and prevalence of sex appeal for people who were wild and on the edge.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Later I would come to
This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she'd noticed a lot in people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. But they recycled their newspapers!
Lorrie Moore Quotes: This lunge at moral fastidiousness
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 Quotes: While my scarcely controlled rage
Love is a fever," she said. "And when you come out of it you'll discover whether you've been lucky - or not.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Love is a fever,
My mother's capacity for happiness was a small soup bone salting a large pot.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: My mother's capacity for happiness
Sometimes as I'm drifting toward sleep, in the beginnings of that dissolution, I wonder where I am, when this is, and realize that at these moments I could be anywhere, anytime, for all I know: eight and napping in the trailer, my broken arm in a cast, or thirteen at night clutching a pillow to my neck, or twenty in the arms of my boyfriend, or twenty-seven in the arms of my husband, or thirty-three next to my imaginary daughter; at every place in the whole spinning shape that is my life, when I am falling asleep, I am the same person, the identical awareness, the same fuzzball of mind, the same muck of nerves, all along the line. I forage through my life and everywhere - there, there, and there - it is only me in it, the very same me, the same harmless lump, the same soggy weirdo, the same sleeping, breathing bun.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Sometimes as I'm drifting toward
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 Quotes: The later-afternoon air of our
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 Quotes: When I was in graduate
I did think reviewers were supposed to be polite about story collections - collections are rather delicate creatures in the literary environment - but not everybody got this memo, I guess.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: I did think reviewers were
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 Quotes: I do have people in
If you look at most women's writing, women writers will describe women differently from the way male writers describe women. The details that go into a woman writer's description of a female character are, perhaps, a little more judgmental. They're looking for certain things, because they know what women do to look a certain way.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: If you look at most
Amber was past tense. We were covering her inanimate face in the white sheet of was.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Amber was past tense. We
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 Quotes: At home in Dellacrosse my
Blasts from the past were like the rooms one entered and re-entered in dreams: they would not stay nailed down. When you returned to them, they had changed - they suddenly had more space or a tilt or a door that had not been there before. New people were milling around, the floors undulated, and the sun shone newly, strangely in the windows, or through the now blasted-open ceiling, or else it shone not at all, as if having fled the sky.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Blasts from the past were
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 Quotes: I grew up with 'Life'
An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: An author's life is different,
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 Quotes: This was love, I supposed,
Forget being a decent man, Terence. Go for castability. Could you even play a decent man in a movie?
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Forget being a decent man,
I think women do write politically all the time. Margaret Atwood does; Doris Lessing does.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: I think women do write
Things, I know, stiffen and shift in memory, become what they never were before. As when an army takes over a country. Or a summer yard goes scarlet with fall and its venous leaves. One summons the years of the past largely by witchcraft-a whore's arts, collage and brew, eye of newt, heart of horse. Still, the house of my childhood is etched in my memory like the shape of the mind itself: a house-shaped mind-why not? It was this particular mind out of which I ventured-for any wild danger or sentimental stance or lunge at something faraway. But it housed every seedling act. I floated above it, but close, like a figure in a Chagall.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Things, I know, stiffen and
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 Quotes: For driving, a January thaw
The thing to remember about love affairs," says Simone, "is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney."
...
We have raccoons sometimes in our chimney," explains Simone.
And once we tried to smoke them out. We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back. Instead, they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames and running madly around until they dropped dead." Simone swallows some wine. "Love affairs are like that," she says. "They are all like that.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: The thing to remember about
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 Quotes: The night before, a whole
Let's make our own way,' says the Mother, 'and not in this boat.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Let's make our own way,'
After a childhood of hungering to be an adult, my hunger had passed. Unexpected fates had begun to catch my notice. These middle-aged women seemed very tired to me, as if hope had been wrung out of them and replaced with a deathly, walking sort of sleep.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: After a childhood of hungering
She had, without realizing it at the time, learned to follow Nick's gaze, learned to learn his lust ... his desires remained memorized within her. She looked at the attractive women he would look at ... She had become him: she longed for these women. But she was also herself, and so she despised them. She lusted after them, but she also wanted to beat them up. A rapist. She had become a rapist, driving to work in a car.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: She had, without realizing it
All this wandering that you do," he said, leaning in the window, his face white as a cream cheese, his scar the carved zigzag of a snowmobile across a winter lake. Wind blew handsomely through his hair. "How will anyone ever get close to you?"
"I don't know," she said. She shook his hand through the window and then put on her gloves.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: All this wandering that you
I'm very interested in what people will do for money. Money: it's timeless.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: I'm very interested in what
Quilty grimaces. "I don't like what comes after 'dicker.' " "What is that?" Quilty sighs. "Dickest. I mean, really: it's not a contest!
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Quilty grimaces.
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 Quotes: For love to last, you
What I really felt was this: chopped down like a tree, a new feeling, and I was realizing that all new feelings from here on in would probably be bad ones. Surprises would no longer be good. And feelings might take on actual physical form, like those sad fish lips, a mouth speared into a gasping silence, or worse.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: What I really felt was
Every family is a family of alligators.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Every family is a family
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 Quotes: I count too heavily on
In so many things I loved I was sadly insufficiently gifted and driven. But writing I could plod along with -- and no one discouraged me. People were much kinder. I headed toward the kindness.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: In so many things I
Don't mistake a lack of sophistication for sweetness.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Don't mistake a lack of
The key to marriage, she concluded, was just not to take the thing too personally.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: The key to marriage, she
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 Quotes: it seemed one could just
I said nothing. If she wasn't careful, everyone would rush out of her life, life out of a burning building.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: I said nothing. If she
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 Quotes: Editing is just ongoing. I
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 Quotes: Some people get their books
The only happiness you have is writing something new, in the middle of the night, armpits damp, heart pounding, something no one has yet seen. You have only those brief, fragile, untested moments of exhilaration when you know: you are a genius.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: The only happiness you have
All the world's a stage we're going through.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: All the world's a stage
A match made in heaven - where do you get those? That's what I want to know!
Lorrie Moore Quotes: A match made in heaven
You are unhappy because you believe in such a thing as happy.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: You are unhappy because you
She came to this California university for one reason, she reminds herself: the paycheck. Although every time the paycheck arrives the amount taken out in taxes for a single woman with no dependents is so huge it stuns her. The money starts to feel like an insult: For this, she thinks, I've uprooted my life? Whatever money she might save, moreover, she usually spends trying to console herself. And it is hard to make any job financially worth its difficulties, she realizes, when you're constantly running out to J. C. Penney's to buy bathmats.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: She came to this California
Unfortunately, you have lost the respect of all but one of your co-workers and many of your superiors as well, who are working in order to send their daughters to universities so they won't have to be secretaries, and who, therefore, hold you in contempt for having a degree and being a failure anyway. It is like having a degree in failure.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Unfortunately, you have lost the
But family life sometimes had a vortex, like weather. It could be like a tornado in a quiet zigzag: get close enough and you might see within it a spinning eighteen-wheeler and a woman.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: But family life sometimes had
She had to learn not to be afraid of a man, the way, in your childhood, you learned not to be afraid of an earthworm or a bug. Often, when she spoke to men at parties, she rushed things in her mind. As the man politely blathered on, she would fall in love, marry, then find herself in a bitter custody battle with him for the kids and hoping for a reconciliation, so that despite all his betrayals she might no longer despise him, and in the few minutes remaining, learn, perhaps, what his last name was, and what he did for a living, though probably there was already too much history between them.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: She had to learn not
He stepped back, away from her. He shook his head in disbelief. "You know, I shouldn't try to go out with career women. You're all stricken. A guy can really tell what life has done to you. I do better with women who have part-time jobs."

"Oh, yes?" said Zoe. She had once read an article entitled "Professional Women and the Demographics of Grief." Or no, it was a poem: If there were a lake, the moonlight would dance across it in conniptions. She remembered that line. But perhaps the title was "The Empty House: Aesthetics of Bareness." Or maybe "Space Gypsies: Girls in Academe." She had forgotten.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: He stepped back, away from
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 Quotes: I had seen this exact
I guessed that only at the last possible minute did the soul in a determined fashion flee the dying flesh. Who could blame it for its reluctance? We loved our lives more than we ever knew, and at the end felt the bounty of them, as one would say in church, felt even the richness of their missed opportunities, or just understood that they were more than we had realized during the living of them and a lot to give up.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: I guessed that only at
A funny line can never exist on its own. It needs to be surrounded by mood and circumstances.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: A funny line can never
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 Quotes: On Fridays there were fish
What little reality television I've seen seems to be about economic desperation. Like the marathon dancing of the Great Depression, which should give us pause. People willing to eat flies and worms for a sum that is less than the weekly paycheck of the show's producer. I haven't seen "reality television" that is other than this kind of painful, sadistic exploitation of fit young people looking for agents.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: What little reality television I've
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 Quotes: Adults are living increasingly as
His eyes were caught in the headlights of something - foreign policy?
Lorrie Moore Quotes: His eyes were caught in
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 Quotes: I felt nothing like a
Tragedies, I was coming to realize through my daily studies in humanities both in and out of the classroom, were a luxury. They were constructions of an affluent society, full of sorrow and truth but without moral function. Stories of the vanquishing of the spirit expressed and underscored a certain societal spirit to spare. The weakening of the soul, the story of the downfall and the failed overcoming - trains missed, letters not received, pride flaring, the demolition of one's own offspring, who were then served up in stews - this was awe-inspiring, wounding entertainment told uselessly and in comfort at tables full of love and money. Where life was meagerer, where the tables were only half full, the comic triumph of the poor was the useful demi-lie. Jokes were needed. And then the baby feel down the stairs. This could be funny! Especially in a place and time where worse things happened. It wasn't that suffering was a sweepstakes, but it certainly was relative. For understanding and for perspective, suffering required a butcher's weighing. And to ease the suffering of the listener, things had better be funny. Though they weren't always. And this is how, sometimes, stories failed us: Not that funny. Or worse, not funny in the least.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Tragedies, I was coming to
A veteran of the gender wars.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: A veteran of the gender
My new apartment might be a place where there are lots of children. They might gather on my porch to play, and when I step out for groceries, they will ask me, "Hi, do you have any kids?" and then, "Why not, don't you like kids?"
"I like kids," I will explain. "I like kids very much." And when I almost run over them with my car, in my driveway, I will feel many different things.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: My new apartment might be
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 Quotes: I've been falsely accused of
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 Quotes: But I keep thinking love
Also, he had the kind of mustache a college roommate of hers used to say looked like it had crawled up to find a warm spot to die.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Also, he had the kind
Where does love go? When something you have taped on the wall falls off, what has happened to the stickum? It has relaxed. It has accumulated an assortment of hairs and fuzzies. It has said "Fuck it" and given up. It doesn't go anywhere special, it's just gone. Energy is created, and then it is destroyed. So much for the laws of physics. So much for chemistry. So much for not so much.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Where does love go? When
She kept wandering in and out of the rooms, wondering where she had put things. She went downstairs into the basement for no reason at all except that it amused her to own a basement. It also amused her to own a tree.
Her parents, in Maryland, had been very pleased that one of their children had at last been able to afford real estate, and when she closed on the house they sent her flowers with a congratulations card.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: She kept wandering in and
Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Every arrangement in life carried
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 Quotes: After four movies, three concerts,
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 Quotes: I'm surrounded by music; I
Through all the muck of themselves, the times they had unobligated each other, the anger, the permitted absences, the loneliness grown dangerous, she had always returned to him. He'd had faith in that - abracadabra! But eventually the deadlines set in again. Could you live in the dead excellence of a thing - the stupid mortar of a body, the stubborn husk love had crawled from? Yes, he thought.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Through all the muck of
By about the sixth week the smallness of the class, and whatever makeshift intimacy had sprung up there, became suddenly oppressive to me ... suddenly I wanted the anonymity of a large class, where class members did not really have faces and names and problems. In six weeks with Susan, Lodeme, Betty, Valerie, Ellen, Frances, Pat, Marie, Bridget, and Barney, ( ... ) brought to the stubborn limits of our knowability, we were now left with the jagged scrape of our differences.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: By about the sixth week
And all love that had overtaken her would have to be a memory, a truck on the interstate roaring up from the left, a thing she must let pass.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: And all love that had
Decide that you like college life. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Decide that you like college
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 Quotes: So much urgent and lifelike
There was sex where you were looked in the eye and beautiful things were said to you, and then there was what Ira used to think of as yoo-hoo sex: where the other person seemed spirited away, not quite there, their pleasure mysterious and crazy and only accidentally involving you. "Yoo-hoo?" was what his grandmother always called before entering a house where she knew someone but not well enough to know whether they were actually home.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: There was sex where you
Life was unendurable, and yet everywhere it was endured.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Life was unendurable, and yet
I had never feared insomnia before
like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?
Lorrie Moore Quotes: I had never feared insomnia
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 Quotes: Shopping for clothes is like
Do not resent her. Think about the situation, for instance, when you take the last trash bag from its box: you must throw out the box by putting it in that very trash bag. What was once contained, now must contain. The container, then, becomes the contained, the enveloped, the held.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Do not resent her. Think
If you were alone when you were born, alone when you were dying, really absolutely alone when you were dead, why "learn to be alone" in between? If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You didn't have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell off the bike: I was drinking my wine too quickly.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: If you were alone when
One should never turn one's back on a vivid imagination.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: One should never turn one's
Don't make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Don't make your own life
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 Quotes: The whole idea that people
I loved to say quasi. I was saying it now a lot, instead of sort of, or kind of, and it had become a tic. "I am quasi ready to go," I would announce. Or, "I'm feeling a bit quasi today." Murph called me Quasimodo. Or Kami-quasi. Or wild and quasi girl.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: I loved to say quasi.
Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Nothing's a joke with me.
Through college she had been a feminist - basically: she shaved her legs, but just not often enough, she liked to say.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Through college she had been
Zoe tried to sound like an older sister.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Zoe tried to sound like
I tried to live cautiously - or eventually learned to try to live - in a spirit of regret prevention, and I could not see how Bonnie could accomplish such a thing in this situation. Regret - operatic, oceanic, fathomless - seemed to stretch before her in every direction. No matter which path she took, regret would stain her feet and scratch her arms and rain down on her, lightlessly and lifelong. It had already begun.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: I tried to live cautiously
No wine," she said. "It leads to cheese.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: No wine,
The ants are my friends- they're blowing in the wind
Lorrie Moore Quotes: The ants are my friends-
The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riveted, but in separate narratives, and so our interactions seemed weird and richly meaningless, like the characters in a Tennessee Williams play, with their bursting unimportant, but spell-bindingly mad speeches.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: The people in this house,
That's not the one you were thinking of?"
"No." There was accusation in her voice. "Mine was different,
Lorrie Moore Quotes: That's not the one you
She had worn a sequined, strapless wedding gown, and left her bridesmaid to wear brightly flowered dresses to fit for a kind of pornographic milkmaid: low-cut and laced up the midriff with a sort of shoelace. What Scarlet O'Hara might have done with a shower curtain, if she were trying to snag a plumber.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: She had worn a sequined,
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 Quotes: I am stealing more and
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 Quotes: In an attempt at extroversion,
Do you think people can be rehabilitated and forgiven?"
"Sure! Look at Ollie North."
"Well, he lost that Senate race. He was not sufficiently forgiven."
"But he got some votes," Jan insisted.
"Yeah, and now what is he doing?"
"Now he's back promoting a line of fire-retardant pajamas. It's a life!
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Do you think people can
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 Quotes: The whiskey was going down
I mean ... " Dennis was saying, looking pointedly at Mave, but Mave was watching the waitress approach. Oh, life, oh, sweet, forgiven for the ice ... He grabbed Mave's wrist. There was always an emergency. And then there was love. And then there was another emergency. That was the sandwiching of it. Emergency. Love. Emergency. "I mean, it's not as if you've been dozing off," Dennis was saying, his voice reaching her now, high and watery. "I mean, correct me if I'm wrong," he said, "but I don't think I've been having this conversation alone." He tightened his grip. "I mean, have I?
Lorrie Moore Quotes: I mean ...
Win them with your beauty, but catch them off guard with your soul.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Win them with your beauty,
Wake up one morning with a man you had thought you'd spend your life with, and realize, a rock in your gut, that you don't even like him. Spend a weepy afternoon in his bathroom, not coming out when he knocks. You can no longer trust your affections. People and places you think you love may be people and places you hate.
Lorrie Moore Quotes: Wake up one morning with
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 Quotes: When you were six you
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