Lorrie Moore
27 quotes
Biography
Lorrie Moore is an American writer, critic, and essayist. She is best known for her short stories, some of which have won major awards.
"A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film."
"Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension."
"This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic."
"They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die."
"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."
"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."
"And so they drove on. The night before, a whole day could have shape and design. But when it was upon you, it could vanish tragically to air."
"Abby began to think that all the beauty and ugliness and turbulence one found scattered through nature, one could also find in people themselves, all collected there, all together in a single place. No matter what terror or loveliness the earth could produce- wind, 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."
"But she had no memory of how to be brave. Here, it seemed, she had no memories at all. Nothing triggered them. And once in a while, when shegave voice to the fleeting edge of one, it seemed like something she was making up."
"As a vacuum cleaner can start to pull up the actual thread of a carpet, her brains had been sucked dry by too much yoga."
""The United States- how can you live in that country?" the man had asked. Agnes had shrugged. "A lot of my stuff is there," she'd said, and it was then that she first felt all the dark love and shame that came from the pure accident of home, the deep and arbitary place that happened to be yours."
"Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself."
"Every songwriter in their smallest song seems to possess some monumental grief clarified and dignified by melody, Bill thinks. His own sadnesses, on the other hand, slosh about in his life in a low-key way, formless and self-consuming."
"But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless."
"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."
"He will talk about what "some other people said," and what he and "some other people did," and when he never specifically mentions women it will be like the Soviet news agency which never publicizes anything containing the names of the towns where the new bombs are."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The passive voice could always be used to obscure blame."
"I had one elegantly folded cookie—a short paper nerve baked in an ear."
"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."
"I don't sit down to write a funny story. Every single thing I sit down to write is meant to be sad."
"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."