Lorrie Moore Quotes & Sayings

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

Things, I know, stiffen and shift in memory, become what they never were before. As when an army takes over a country. Or a summer yard goes scarlet with fall and its venous leaves. One summons the years of the past largely by witchcraft-a whore's arts, collage and brew, eye of newt, heart of horse. Still, the house of my childhood is etched in my memory like the shape of the mind itself: a house-shaped mind-why not? It was this particular mind out of which I ventured-for any wild danger or sentimental stance or lunge at something faraway. But it housed every seedling act. I floated above it, but close, like a figure in a Chagall. — Lorrie Moore

This is Quilty's audition ritual: whenever he feels it is time for it, he calls upon himself to audition for love. He has no script, no reliable sense of stage, just a faceful of his heart's own greasepaint and a relentless need for applause. — Lorrie Moore

Quilty grimaces. "I don't like what comes after 'dicker.' " "What is that?" Quilty sighs. "Dickest. I mean, really: it's not a contest! — Lorrie Moore

The situation was not easy for her, they knew. Once, at the start of last semester, she had skipped into her lecture hall singing "Getting to Know You" - both verses. At the request of the dean the chairman had called her into his office, but did not ask her for an explanation, not really. He asked her how she was and then smiled in an avuncular way. She said, "Fine," and he studied the way she said it, her front teeth catching on the inside of her lower lip. She was almost pretty, but her face showed the strain and ambition of always having been close but not quite. — Lorrie Moore

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

She was not good on the phone. She needed the face, the pattern of eyes, nose, trembling mouth ... People talking were meant to look at a face, the disastrous cupcake of it, the hide-and-seek of the heart dashing across. With a phone, you said words, but you never watched them go in. You saw them off at the airport but never knew whether there was anyone there to greet them when they got off the plane. — Lorrie Moore

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

Forget being a decent man, Terence. Go for castability. Could you even play a decent man in a movie? — Lorrie Moore

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

These were the sorts of notions that had been raised in all my classes, and we had chased them round and round like dogs maddened by their tails. — Lorrie Moore

He stepped back, away from her. He shook his head in disbelief. "You know, I shouldn't try to go out with career women. You're all stricken. A guy can really tell what life has done to you. I do better with women who have part-time jobs."

"Oh, yes?" said Zoe. She had once read an article entitled "Professional Women and the Demographics of Grief." Or no, it was a poem: If there were a lake, the moonlight would dance across it in conniptions. She remembered that line. But perhaps the title was "The Empty House: Aesthetics of Bareness." Or maybe "Space Gypsies: Girls in Academe." She had forgotten. — Lorrie Moore

At that time in my life I was never late. Only a year later would I suddenly have difficulty hanging on to any sense of time, leaving friends sitting, invariably, for a half hour here or there. Time would waft past me undetectably or absurdly - laughably when I could laugh - in quantities I was incapable of measuring or obeying. But that year, when I was twenty, I was as punctual as a priest. Were priests punctual? Cave-raised, divinely dazed, I believed them to be. — Lorrie Moore

The compulsion to read and write - and it seems to me it should be, even must be, a compulsion - is a bit of mental wiring the species has selected, over time, in order, as the life span increases, to keep us interested in ourselves. — 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

If you record the world honestly, there's no way people can stop being funny. A lot of fiction writing doesn't get that idea, as if to acknowledge it would trivialize the story or trivialize human nature, when in fact human nature is reduced and falsified if the comic aspects are not included. — Lorrie Moore

Adults are living increasingly as children: completely in their imaginations. Reading Harry Potter while every newspaper in the country goes out of business. They know so little that is real. — Lorrie Moore

Love is the answer, said the songs, and that's OK. It was OK, I supposed, as an answer. But no more than that. It was not a solution; it wasn't really even an answer, just a reply. — 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

For driving, a January thaw was always preferable to actual ice, but when it was over things froze more treacherously than before. And in its melting and condensing the roadside snow turned to clumps reminiscent of black-spotted cauliflower. Better never to have thawed. — Lorrie Moore

The later-afternoon air of our exhalations hung in brief clouds before us. The thought balloon of my own breath said, "How have I found myself here?" It was not a theological question. It was one of transportation and neurology. — Lorrie Moore

If God Speaks Through Burning Bushes, Let's Burn Bush and Listen to What God Says. — Lorrie Moore

We used awesome the way the British used brilliant: for anything at all. Perhaps ... it was a kind of antidepressant: inflated rhetoric to keep the sorry truth at bay. — Lorrie Moore

I love plays. Even bad ones. I like the fact that actual live, breathing people are standing before you in tense situations that you are not personally responsible for. — Lorrie Moore

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

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

This was supposed to be the Presidential Suite," she said, gazing into the room at the holes in the wall.
well, even presidents get shot," I said.
I was just going to say that myself," she said, smiling. "But I didn't want to scare you."
I didn't know whether this was interesting
that we were both thinking the same gruesome thing
or even whether it was actually the case. Perhaps it was just rhetorical ESP: Kreskin's Guide to Etiquette. But even if it was true, that we were about to say the same thing, did this connect us in some deep private way? Or was it just a random obviousness shared between strangers? The deeper life between two people I had yet to read with confidence. It seemed a kind of vaporous text that kept revising its very alphabet. An exfoliating narrative, my professors would probably say. The paratext of the possible. — 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

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

She gave him books of poetry: Wordsworth, Whitman, all the W's. When she'd ask him how he liked them, he would say, "Fine. I'm on page ... " and then he would tell her what page he was on and how many pages he'd accomplished that day. — Lorrie Moore

He calls you occasionally at the office to ask how you are. You doodle numbers and curlicues on the corners of Rolodex cards. Fiddle with your Phi Beta Kappa key. Stare out the window. You always, always, say: Fine. — Lorrie Moore

I had seen this exact same expression and movement before - where? In the future I would come to know that look as the beginning of the end of love - the death of a man's trying. It read as Haughty Fatigue. Like the name of a stripper. — Lorrie Moore

From here on in, many things can happen. But the main one will be this: you decide not to go to law school after all, and, instead, you spend a good, big chunk of your adult life telling people how you decided not to go to law school after all. Somehow you end up writing again. — Lorrie Moore

The catalog showed a man sleeping peacefully while his model-wife read a book in soft but focused light. In real life, however, the light was so intense that the same man would have had to wear sunglasses. — Lorrie Moore

I tried not to think about my life. I did not have any good solid plans for it long-term - no bad plans either, no plans at all - and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my friends (marriage, children, law school), sometimes shamed me. Other times in my mind I defended such a condition as morally and intellectually superior - my life was open and ready and free - but that did not make it less lonely. — Lorrie Moore

Win them with your beauty, but catch them off guard with your soul. — Lorrie Moore

My grandmother, who, when I visited, stared at me with the staggering, arrogant stare of the dying, the wise vapidity of the already gone; she refused to occupy the features of her face. — Lorrie Moore

Most things good for writing are bad for life. — Lorrie Moore

A veteran of the gender wars. — Lorrie Moore

I am thinking of the dancing body's magnificent and ostentatious scorn. This is how we offer ourselves, enter heaven, enter speaking: we say with motion, in space, This is what life's done so far down here; this is all and what and everything it's managed - this body, these bodies, that body - so what do you think, Heaven? What do you fucking think? — Lorrie Moore

This is a Hieronymous Bosch of facts and figures and blood and graphs. — 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

Personally I've never put much store by honesty- I mean how can you trust a word whose first letter you don't even pronounce — 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

I think women do write politically all the time. Margaret Atwood does; Doris Lessing does. — Lorrie Moore

She knew that the world was not created to speak just to her, and yet, as with her son, sometimes things did. — Lorrie Moore

If I had a staff of even one person, or could tolerate a small amphetamine habit, or entertain the possibility of weekly blood transfusions, or had been married to Vera Nabokov, or had a housespouse of even minimal abilities, a literary life would be easier to bring about. (In my mind I see all your male readers rolling their eyes. But your female ones - what is that? Are they nodding in agreement? Are their fists in the air?) — Lorrie Moore

Farmers aren't rich. They have land but no money." Actually, my father didn't even have that much land. He had once stood on the porch and flung his arms out and said, "Someday kids, all this will be yours." But his knuckles hit the porch supports. Even the porch wasn't that big. — Lorrie Moore

I want to create something that doesn't exist exactly in the real world, but exists in a kind of parallel to the real world. — Lorrie Moore

1976. The Bicentennial. In the laundromat, you want for the time on your coins to run out. Through the porthole of the dryer, you watch your bedeviled towels and sheets leap and fall. The radio station piped in from the ceiling plays slow, sad Motown; it encircles you with the desperate hopefulness of a boy at a dance, and it makes you cry. When you get back to your apartment, dump everything on your bed. Your mother is knitting crookedly: red, white, and blue. Kiss her hello. Say: "Sure was warm in the place." She will seem not to hear you. — Lorrie Moore

There was sex where you were looked in the eye and beautiful things were said to you, and then there was what Ira used to think of as yoo-hoo sex: where the other person seemed spirited away, not quite there, their pleasure mysterious and crazy and only accidentally involving you. "Yoo-hoo?" was what his grandmother always called before entering a house where she knew someone but not well enough to know whether they were actually home. — 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

To write a short story, you have to be able to stay up all night. — 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 missed him. Love, I realized, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that. — Lorrie Moore

At home in Dellacrosse my place in the world of college and Troy and incipient adulthood dissolved and I became an unseemly collection of jostling former selves. Snarkiness streaked through my voice, or sullenness drove me behind a closed door for hours at a time. — 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

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

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

From Charades: when she was younger she was a frustrated mother, so she is pleased when her children act as is they don't remember — Lorrie Moore

I guessed that only at the last possible minute did the soul in a determined fashion flee the dying flesh. Who could blame it for its reluctance? We loved our lives more than we ever knew, and at the end felt the bounty of them, as one would say in church, felt even the richness of their missed opportunities, or just understood that they were more than we had realized during the living of them and a lot to give up. — Lorrie Moore

The faces of the panel listening were the very embodiment of skepticism made flesh. — 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

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. — Lorrie Moore

I cried for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sent out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are true, you do! — Lorrie Moore

Start dating someone who is funny, someone who has what in high school you called a "really great sense of humor" and what now your creative writing class calls "self-contempt giving rise to comic form." Write down all of his jokes, but don't tell him you are doing this. Make up anagrams of his old girlfriend's name and name all of your socially handicapped characters with them. Tell him his old girlfriend is in all of your stories and then watch how funny he can be, see what a really great sense of humor he can have. — Lorrie Moore

It's two against one out here; we just keep taking turns. — 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

You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills. — 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

Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself. — Lorrie Moore

Though what bird in the best of circumstances does not look a little stricken? — Lorrie Moore

Like everyone he knew, he could discern the hollowness in people's charm only when it was directed at someone other than himself. — 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

Perhaps everyone had their own way of preparing to die. Life got you ready. — Lorrie Moore

The whole idea that people have a clue as to how the world works, is just a piece of laughable metaphysical colonialism perpetrated upon the wild country of time. — Lorrie Moore

My father was the child of academics and was probably destined to become an academic himself but vetoed that idea. Bailed, dropped out of graduate school and just went to work for an insurance company. But the house was full of books and music and all of that. — Lorrie Moore

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

A lie to the faithless is merely a conversation in their language. — 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

Her body was a mix of thin and plump, her skin lined and unlined, in that rounding-the-corner-to-fifty way. Age and youth, he chanted silently, youth and age, sing their songs on the very same stage. — Lorrie Moore

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

Denial, when one was accused, was a life force, and would trump any desire to confess. Perhaps this was the animal strength of the psychopathic brain. Or the psychopathy of the animal brain. An admission of guilt would knock the strength right out of you - making it easier for them to twist your arms behind you and put the handcuffs on. — Lorrie Moore

There is something comforting, thinks Mack, in embracing someone the same size as you. — 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

All the world's a stage we're going through. — 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

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

Later on in life you will learn that writers are merely open, helpless texts with no real understanding of what they have written and therefore must half-believe anything and everything that is said of them. — Lorrie Moore

How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are 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

After a childhood of hungering to be an adult, my hunger had passed. Unexpected fates had begun to catch my notice. These middle-aged women seemed very tired to me, as if hope had been wrung out of them and replaced with a deathly, walking sort of sleep. — Lorrie Moore

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

Pleasantness was the machismo of the Midwest. There was something athletic about it. You flexed your face into a smile and let it hover there like the dare of a cat. — 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

We curl up on the couch together, under a blanket, whisper I love you, I missed you, confusing tenses I think. — Lorrie Moore

But I believed in starting over. There was finally, I knew, only rupture and hurt and falling short between all persons, but, Shirley, the best revenge was to turn your life into a small gathering of miracles.
If I could not be anchored and profound, I would try, at least, to be kind. — Lorrie Moore

You couldn't pretend you had lost nothing ... you had to begin there, not let your blood freeze over. If your heart turned away at this, it would turn away at something greater, then more and more until your heart stayed averted, immobile, your imagination redistributed away from the world and back only toward the bad maps of yourself, the sour pools of your own pulse, your own tiny, mean, and pointless wants. — Lorrie Moore