Lorrie Moore Quotes

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

Don't make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time. ~ Lorrie Moore

Precancer?' she had repeated quietly, for she was a quiet woman. 'Isn't that ... like life? ~ Lorrie Moore

I watched my friend Eleanor give birth," she said. "Once you've seen a child born, you realize a baby's not much more than a reconstituted ham and cheese sandwich. Just a little anagram of you and what you've been eating for nine months. ~ Lorrie Moore

The ants are my friends- they're blowing in the wind ~ Lorrie Moore

(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

Mostly, however, he had books about love. He believed in studying his own heart this way. ~ Lorrie Moore

I don't think of any sentence as a "one-liner", but I do pay attention to how people actually speak when they are being funny. Rhythm is key. ~ Lorrie Moore

Zoe tried to sound like an older sister. ~ Lorrie Moore

At times like these, she thought, it was probably a good idea to carry a small hand puppet. ~ Lorrie Moore

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

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

To write a short story, you have to be able to stay up all night. ~ Lorrie Moore

It would be a combination of comfort and surprise an audience might appreciate. ~ Lorrie Moore

Writing has to be an obsession - it's only for those who say, 'I'm not going to do anything else.' ~ Lorrie Moore

She knew there were only small joys in life
the big ones were too complicated to be joys when you got all through
and once you realized that, it took a lot of the pressure off. ~ Lorrie Moore

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

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

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

Basically, I realized I was living in that awful stage of life between twenty-six to and thirty-seven known as stupidity. It's when you don't know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don't even have a philosophy about all the things you don't know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight. ~ Lorrie Moore

Losing confidence was more violent than losing love. Losing love was a slow dying, but losing confidence was a quick coup, a floor that opened right up and swallowed. ~ Lorrie Moore

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

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

An agony. The exit like the entrance - but reversed. A palindrome: gut-tug. ~ Lorrie Moore

The faces of the panel listening were the very embodiment of skepticism made flesh. ~ Lorrie Moore

I've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change. ~ Lorrie Moore

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mave believed that not being able to see your life clearly, to scrutinize it intelligently, meant that probably you were at the dead center of it, and that couldn't possibly be a bad thing. ~ Lorrie Moore

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

Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension. ~ Lorrie Moore

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

Divorce, she could see, would be like marriage - a power grab, as in who would be the dog, and who would be the owner of the dog. ~ Lorrie Moore

I can't believe I just asked you to hold my hand,' said Ira, but Mike had already taken it. ~ Lorrie Moore

I usually grow sick of my short-story characters and think, 'I never want to see you again.' ~ Lorrie Moore

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

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

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

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

Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one. ~ Lorrie Moore

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

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

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

But there was in the air that kind of distortion that bent you a little; it caused your usual self to grow slippery, to wander off and shop, to get blurry, bleed, bevel with possibility. ~ Lorrie Moore

Life is a field of corn. Literature is the shot glass it distills down into. Lorrie Moore ~ Mary Karr

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

One should never turn one's back on a vivid imagination. ~ Lorrie Moore

There seemed nothing so true as a yellow tree. ~ Lorrie Moore

All of life seems to me a strange dream about losing things you never had to begin with. About trying to find your glasses when you can't see because you don't have your glasses on. ~ Lorrie Moore

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

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

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

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

No wine," she said. "It leads to cheese. ~ Lorrie Moore

That's not the one you were thinking of?"
"No." There was accusation in her voice. "Mine was different, ~ Lorrie Moore

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

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

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

The key to marriage, she concluded, was just not to take the thing too personally. ~ Lorrie Moore

If one loves stories, then one would naturally love the story of the story. Or the story behind the story, pick your preposition. It does seem to me to be a kind of animal impulse almost, a mammalian curiosity. For a reader to wonder about the autobiography in a fiction may be completely unavoidable and in fact may speak to the success of a particular narrative, though it may also speak to its failure. ~ Lorrie Moore

We are lucky simply to be alive together; why get differentiating and judgemental about who is here among us? Thank God there is anyone at all. ~ Lorrie Moore

Years later, when they were killed in a car crash on the Farm to Market Road, and the Nell-that-never-lived died with them, Olena, numbly rearranging the letters of her own name on the envelopes of the sympathy cards she received, discovered what the letters spelled: Olena; Alone. ~ Lorrie Moore

I realized that life was too short for anyone honestly and thoroughly to outgrow anything, but it was clear that some people were making more of an effort than others. ~ Lorrie Moore

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

And it was then that she first felt all the dark love and shame that came from the pure accident of home, the deep and arbitrary place that happened to be yours. ~ Lorrie Moore

The trick to flying safely, Zoe always said, was to never buy a discount ticket and to tell yourself you had nothing to live for anyway, so that when the plane crashed it was no big deal. Then, when it didn't crash, when you had succeeded in keeping it aloft with your own worthlessness, all you had to do was stagger off, locate your luggage, and, by the time a cab arrived, come up with a persuasive reason to go on living. ~ Lorrie Moore

Life was unendurable, and yet everywhere it was endured. ~ Lorrie Moore

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

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

Perhaps one would be wise when young even to avoid thinking of oneself as a writer - for there's something a little stopped and satisfied, too healthy, in that. Better to think of writing, of what one does as an activity, rather than an identity - to write, I write; we write; to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun; to keep working at the thing, at all hours, in all places, so that your life does not become a pose, a pornography of wishing. ~ Lorrie Moore

If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry. ~ Lorrie Moore

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

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

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

I steal back into dreams of you, your unmade bed a huge open-faced sandwich. ~ Lorrie Moore

We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things. ~ Lorrie Moore

I often think that at the center of me is a voice that at last did split, a house in my heart so invaded with other people and their speech, friends I believed I was devoted to, people whose lives I can simply guess at now, that it gives me the impression I am simply a collection of them, that they all existed for themselves, but had inadvertently formed me, then vanished. But, what: Should I have been expected to create my own self, out of nothing, out of thin, thin air and alone? ~ Lorrie Moore

I said nothing. If she wasn't careful, everyone would rush out of her life, life out of a burning building. ~ Lorrie Moore

Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether. ~ Lorrie Moore

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

Tell me something wonderful," he said to Dane. "Tell me that we are going to die dreamfully and loved in our sleep."
"You're always writing one of your plays on the phone," said Dane.
"I said, something wonderful. Say something about springtime."
"It is sloppy and wet. It is a beast from the sea."
"Ah," said Harry. ~ Lorrie Moore

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

Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain, hope played like a playing card upon another hope, a wish for kindnesses and mercies to emerge like kings and queens in an unexpected change of the game. One could hold the cards oneself or not: they would land the same regardless. ~ Lorrie Moore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You have a choice," she told the class. "The whorish emptiness of lies or the straightlaced horrors of truth. ~ Lorrie Moore

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

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

An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story. ~ Lorrie Moore

You were never to say you weren't "fine, thank you - and yourself?" You were supposed to be Heidi. You were supposed to lug goat milk up the hills and not think twice. Heidi did not complain. Heidi did not do things like stand in front of the new IBM photocopier saying, "If this fucking Xerox machine breaks on me one more time, I'm going to slit my wrists. ~ Lorrie Moore

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