Lorrie Moore quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Lorrie Moore on Wise Famous Quotes.

The thought balloon of my own breath said, How have I found myself here?

To write a short story, you have to be able to stay up all night.

I'm very interested in what people will do for money. Money: it's timeless.

Don't mistake a lack of sophistication for sweetness.

Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.

She would try to live life one day at a time, like an alcoholic
drink, don't drink, drink. Perhaps she should take drugs.

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

There seemed nothing so true as a yellow tree.

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

I had never feared insomnia before
like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?

(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.

I steal back into dreams of you, your unmade bed a huge open-faced sandwich.

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

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

Life is sad. Here is someone.

You only live at once. Which seemed to her all the more reason to be careful, to take it easy, to have an ordinary life.

Philosophize: you are a mistress, part of a great hysterical you mean historical tradition.

The ants are my friends- they're blowing in the wind

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.

We were in dialogue that was about something other than what we were saying.

An agony. The exit like the entrance - but reversed. A palindrome: gut-tug.

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

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

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

Amber was not shy. If she had been shy, not one of us would be at Perkins right now.

Which is it," she asked. "Is it CLIToris or clotORis?"
I didn't know. Why didn't I know? "It may depend on which you have," I said.

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

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

While my scarcely controlled rage flew from my mouth in sentences I hoped would be, perhaps not then but perhaps later, like knives to her brain.

A veteran of the gender wars.

As a feminist you mustn't blame the other woman," a neighbor told her. "As a feminist I request that you no longer speak to me," Kit replied.)

We got hard hearts, she said with an accent that wasn't really any particular accent at all. She wasn't good at accents.

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

Everyone these days was defensive about their lives. Everyone had settled.

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

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 ...

It's a form of terrorism not to bomb this town.

Every family is a family of alligators.

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

His fish smells fishier than the others- he is sure of it. Perhaps he has been poisoned.

I feel his lack of love for me.

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.

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

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

That was also back in the days when I thought the ice-cream man lived in his truck

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

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.

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

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

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

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.

If dolphins tasted good," he said, "we wouldn't even know about their language.

You are unhappy because you believe in such a thing as happy.

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

The passive voice could always be used to obscure blame.

One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

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

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

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

My mother's capacity for happiness was a small soup bone salting a large pot.

Zoe tried to sound like an older sister.

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

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.

Get a Job, she shouted silently to God. Get a real Job.

I'm not sure that niceness is what we should promote in writers.

I was realising that all new feelings from here on in would probably be bad ones. Surprises would no longer be good.

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.

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.

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

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

Also, he had the kind of mustache a college roommate of hers used to say looked like it had crawled up to find a warm spot to die.

People will do anything, anything, for a really nice laugh,

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

If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry.

A story is a kind of biopsy of human life. A story is both local, specific, small, and deep, in a kind of penetrating, layered, and revealing way.

Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.

After four movies, three concerts, and two-and-a-half museums, you sleep with him. It seems the right number of cultural events.

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.

Literature, of course, is not a contest.

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

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

I always feel that the book I'm working on is my last book.

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.

he had had some eye work done: a lift to remove the puff and bloat; he would rather look startled and insane than look fifty-six.

Most things good for writing are bad for life.

Yes," she said. "'I Been Working on the Railroad.'There's just two things I'm worried about with that: the grammar and the use of slave labor.

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.

Precancer?' she had repeated quietly, for she was a quiet woman. 'Isn't that ... like life?

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

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

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.

His eyes were caught in the headlights of something - foreign policy?

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

Amber was past tense. We were covering her inanimate face in the white sheet of was.

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

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

I don't sit down to write a funny story. Every single thing I sit down to write is meant to be sad.

The key to marriage, she concluded, was just not to take the thing too personally.

I wondered about the half-life of regret.

She had expected a pistol to seem light and natural-a seamless extension of her angry feral self.