Lorrie Moore Quotes

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.

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

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

She smiled at him, with longing. 'Where do you live,' she asked, 'and how do I get there?

I missed him. Love, I realized, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that.

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

Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real.

Most things good for writing are bad for life.

Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.

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.

I always had the sense with her that she didn't suffer fools gladly but that life was taking great pains to show her how.

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

I don't care if I'm a fish, I still want a bicycle.

A DARK MATTER is a page-turning thriller of every sort: psychological, sociological, epistemological . Plus, it's really scary.

As the most recently arrived to earthly life, children can seem in lingering possession of some heavenly lidless eye.

Perhaps she drives men away. Perhaps, without even being able to help herself, she just puts men into her ill-tempered car and drives them off: to quarries, dumps, small anonymous bodies of water.

This was my modest dream come true: unambitious flight. The kind that never even got high enough for a view.

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.

Sometimes I ask myself if writing novels is even respectable.

Women now were told not to settle for second best, told that they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around.

Love is a fever," she said. "And when you come out of it you'll discover whether you've been lucky - or not.

Things between us were dissolving like an ice cub in a glass: the smaller it got, the faster it disappeared.

I don't have a love life. I have a like life.

There seemed nothing so true as a yellow tree.

I just don't want you to feel uncomfortable about this," he says. Say: "Hey. I am a very cool person. I am tough." Show him your bicep.

Those are the love killers. They love you and then they kill you. They're from another planet. Supposedly.

Rather than a teaching tool, I think a novel is more of a witnessing entity. A witnessing entity? What is that? I just want the reader to step in and experience it as a story.

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

When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet.

Everything one reads is nourishment of some sort - good food or junk food - and one assumes it all goes in and has its way with your brain cells.

I always do the wrong. I do the wrong thing so much that the times I actually do the right thing stand out so brightly in my memory that I forget I always do the wrong thing.

I want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.

I wished for eternal and intriguing muteness. I would be the Mysterious Dumb Girl, the Enigmatic Elf. The human voice no longer interested me.

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

It was part of being a girl in the '60s that you were creative.

Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.

Better to think of writing, of what one does, as an activity, rather than an identity to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun.

A funny line can never exist on its own. It needs to be surrounded by mood and circumstances.

If I retain any freshness of approach, it's by going slowly having long intervals between finished projects.

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.

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.

The night before, a whole day could have shape and design. But when it was upon you, it could vanish tragically to air.

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

She wore a lot of gray-green corduroy. She had been under the impression that it brought out her eyes, those shy stars.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Anyone who's read all of Proust plus The Man withour Qualities is bound t be missing out on a few other titles.