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Lorrie Moore Quotes | Quotes said by Lorrie Moore

  • Lorrie Moore Quote #1

    [T]he normal and the everyday are often amazingly unstoppable, and what is unimaginable is the cessation of them. The world is resilient, and, no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want to return to their lives and get on with them. A veneer of civilization descends quickly, like a shining rain. Dust is settled.


  • Lorrie Moore Quote #2

    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 Quote #3

    Abby began to think that all the beauty and ugliness and turbulence one found scattered through nature, one could also find in people themselves, all collected there, all together in a single place. No matter what terror or loveliness the earth could produce- wind, 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 Quote #4

    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 Quote #5

    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 Quote #6

    Back at home, days later, feel cranky and tired. Sit on the couch and tell him he's stupid. That you bet he doesn't know who Coriolanus is. That since you moved in you've noticed he rarely reads. He will give you a hurt, hungry-to-learn look, with his James Cagney eyes. He will try to kiss you. Turn your head. Feel suffocated. (from How)

  • Lorrie Moore Quote #7

    Bummer,' said Ira, his new word for I must remain as neutral as possible and Your mother's a whore.

  • Lorrie Moore Quote #8

    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 Quote #9

    But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.

  • Lorrie Moore Quote #10

    Cold men destroy women,” my mother wrote me years later. “They woo them with something personable that they bring out for show, something annexed to their souls like a fake greenhouse, lead you in, and you think you see life and vitality and sun and greenness, and then when you love them, they lead you out into their real soul, a drafty, cavernous, empty ballroom, inexorably arched and vaulted and mocking you with its echoes—you hear all you have sacrificed, all you have given, landing with a loud clunk. They lock the greenhouse and you are as tiny as a figure in an architect’s drawing, a faceless splotch, a blur of stick limbs abandoned in some voluminous desert of stone.

  • Lorrie Moore Quote #11

    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 Quote #12

    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 Quote #13

    Every family is a family of alligators.

  • Lorrie Moore Quote #14

    Guns, she was reminded then, were not for girls. They were for boys. They were invented by boys. They were invented by boys who had never gotten over their disappointment that accompanying their own orgasm there wasn't a big boom sound.

  • Lorrie Moore Quote #15

    Guns, she was reminded then, were not for girls. They were for boys. They were invented by boys. They were invented by boys who had never gotten over their disappointment that accompanying their own orgasm there wasn't a big boom sound.

  • Lorrie Moore Quote #16

    He began to prefer talking on the phone to actually getting together with someone, preferred the bodilessness of it, and started to turn down social engagements. He didn't want to actually sit across from someone in a restaurant, look at their face, and eat food. He wanted to turn away, not deal with the face, have the waitress bring them two tin cans and some string so they could just converse, in a faceless dialogue.

  • Lorrie Moore Quote #17

    Her rage flopped awkwardly away like a duck. She felt as she had when her cold, fierce parents had at last grown sick and old, stick-boned and saggy, protected by infirmity the way cuteness protected a baby, or should, it should protect a baby, and she had been left with her rage--vestigial, girlhood rage--inappropriate and intact. She would hug her parents good-bye, the gentle, emptied sacks of them, and think Where did you go?

  • Lorrie Moore Quote #18

    Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.

  • Lorrie Moore Quote #19

    I don't have a love life. I have a like life.'
    Mamie smiled. She thought how nice that might be, to be peacefully free from love...

  • Lorrie Moore Quote #20

    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 Quote #21

    I don’t go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

  • Lorrie Moore Quote #22

    I had one elegantly folded cookie—a short paper nerve baked in an ear.

  • Lorrie Moore Quote #23

    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 Quote #24

    I nodded, trying to imagine the very particular sadness of a vanished childhood yogurt now found only in France. It was a very special sort of sadness, individual, and in its inability to induce sympathy, in its tuneless spark, it bypassed poetry and entered science.

  • Lorrie Moore Quote #25

    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 Quote #26

    I was Baptist and had always prayed, in a damp squint, for things not to happen. Sils was a Catholic, and so she prayed for things to happen, for things to come true. She prayed for love here and now. I prayed for no guns.

  • Lorrie Moore Quote #27

    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 Quote #28

    I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it.

  • Lorrie Moore Quote #29

    I'll go see her tonight,' I said. I felt I was a person of my word, and by saying something I could make it so. It was less like integrity perhaps and more like magic.

  • Lorrie Moore Quote #30

    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.

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