Lorrie Moore Quotes

It reminded me of how children always thought too big, how the world tackled and chiseled them to keep them safe.

~ Lorrie Moore

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

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

She was afraid, and the afraid, she realized, sought opportunities for bravery in love.

~ Lorrie Moore

Pulling through is what people do around here. There is a kind of bravery in their lives that isn’t bravery at all. It is automatic, unflinching, a mix of man and machine, consuming and unquestionable obligation meeting illness move for move in a giant even-steven game of chess – an unending round of something that looks like shadowboxing, though between love and death, which is the shadow? “Everyone admires us for our courage,” says one man. “They have no idea what they’re talking about.”“Courage requires options,” the man adds.“There are options,” says a woman with a thick suede headband. “You could give up. You could fall apart.”“No you can’t. Nobody does. I’ve never seen it,” says the man. “Well, not really fall apart.

~ 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

Why do you haunt me? You, like a tattoo on my tongue, like the bay leaf at the bottom of every pan. You who sprawled out beside me and sang my horoscope to a Schubert symphony, something about travel and money again, and we lay there, both of our breaths bad, both of our underwear dangling elastic, and then you turned toward me with a gaze like two matches, putting the horoscope aside, you traced my buried ribs with your index finger, lingered at my collarbone, admiring it as one might a flying buttress, murmuring: Nice clavicle. And me, too new at it and scared, not knowing what to say, whispering: You should see my ten-speed.

~ Lorrie Moore

Then, when it didn't crash, when you 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

I would be a genius now,” Quilty has said three times already, “if only I’d memorized Shakespeare instead of Lulu.” “If only,” says Mack. Mack himself would be a genius now if only he had been born a completely different person. But what could you do? He’d read in a magazine once that geniuses were born only to women over thirty; his own mother had been twenty-nine. Damn! So fucking close!

~ Lorrie Moore

Observing others go through them, he used to admire midlife crises, the courage and shamelessness and existential daring of them, but after he'd watched his own wife, a respectable nursery school teacher, produce and star in a full-blown one of her own, he found the sufferers of such crises not only self-indulgent but greedy and demented, and he wished them all weird unnatural deaths with various contraptions easily found in garages.

~ Lorrie Moore

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

~ Lorrie Moore

Let's make our own way,' says the Mother, 'and not in this boat.

~ Lorrie Moore

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

~ 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

[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

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

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

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

Every family is a family of alligators.

~ 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

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

Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.

~ Lorrie Moore

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

I've never been to a dinner party where everyone at the dinner table didn't say something funny.

~ Lorrie Moore

You know, I'm just a very boring, not very funny person in person. I don't feel pressured to be otherwise.

~ Lorrie Moore

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