Lorrie Moore Quotes

This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.

~ Lorrie Moore

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

~ 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

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

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

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

~ 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

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

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

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

So I needed to be womanised. I was losing my sheen.

~ Lorrie Moore

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

The turkeys I eat are raised on farms. They're different. They've signed on the dotted line.

~ Lorrie Moore

Marriage, she felt, was a fine arrangement generally, except that one never got it generally. One got it very, very specifically.

~ 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

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

Through college she had been a feminist—basically: she shaved her legs, but just not often enough, she liked to say.

~ Lorrie Moore

It was true. Men could be with whomever they pleased. But women had to date better, kinder, richer, and bright, bright, bright, or else people got embarrassed.

~ 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 kindness 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

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

What makes humans human is precisely that they do not know the future. That is why they do the fateful and amusing things they do: who can say how anything will turn out? Therein lies the only hope for redemption, discovery, and-let’s be frank—fun, fun, fun! There might be things people will get away with. And not just motel towels. There might be great illicit loves, enduring joy, faith-shaking accidents with farm machinery. But you have to not know in order to see what stories your life’s efforts bring you. The mystery is all.

~ Lorrie Moore

In the Dictionary 'lumpy jaw' comes just before 'lunacy,' but in life there are no such clues. Suddenly, for no reason, you might start to dribble from the mouth, to howl peevishly at the moon. You might start quoting your mother, out loud and with conviction. You might lose your friends to the most uninspired of deaths. You might one day wake up and find yourself teaching at a community college; there will have been nothing to warn you. You might say things to your students like, There is only one valid theme in literature: Life will disappoint you.

~ Lorrie Moore

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

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

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

Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain...

~ Lorrie Moore

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

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

This is why a woman makes things up: Because when she dies, those lives she never got to are all going down with her. All those possibilities will just site there like a bunch of school kids with their hands raised and uncalled on--each knowing, really knowing, the answer.

~ Lorrie Moore

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

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

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

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

The passive voice could always be used to obscure blame.

~ Lorrie Moore

This was what Dennis had been doing lately: granting everyone permission to feel the way they were going to feel regardless. It was the books. Dennis’s relationship to his own feelings had become tender, curatorial. Dismantling. Entomological. Mave couldn’t be like that. She treated her emotional life the way she treated her car: She let it go, let it tough it out. To friends she said things like “I know you’re thinking this looks like a ’79, but it’s really an ’87.” She finally didn’t care to understand all that much about her emotional life; she just went ahead and did it. The point, she thought, was to attend the meager theater of it, quietly, and not stand up in the middle and shout, “Oh, my God, you can see the crew backstage!” There was a point at which the study of something became a frightening and naive thing.

~ 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

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

Life is sad. Here is someone.

~ Lorrie Moore

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

How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveler’s mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye’s instructions, is necessarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. All that unsayable life! That’s where the narrator comes in. The narrator comes with her kisses and mimicry and tidying up. The narrator comes and makes a slow, fake song of the mouth’s eager devastation.

~ Lorrie Moore