Lorrie Moore Quotes

72 Sourced Quotes

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.

Lorrie Moore
She had, without realizing it at the time, learned to follow Nick's gaze, learned to learn his lust...his desires remained memorized within her. She looked at the attractive women he would look at...She had become him: she longed for these women. But she was also herself, and so she despised them. She lusted after them, but she also wanted to beat them up. A rapist. She had become a rapist, driving to work in a car.

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
All the way out I listen to the car AM radio, bad lyrics of trailer park love, gin and tonic love, strobe light love, lost and found love, lost and found and lost love, lost and lost and lost love—some people were having no luck at all. The DJ sounds quick and smooth and after-shaved, the rest of the world a mess by comparison.

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

Lorrie Moore
If one loves stories, then one would naturally love the story of the story. Or the story behind the story, pick your preposition. It does seem to me to be a kind of animal impulse almost, a mammalian curiosity.

Lorrie Moore
You emptied the top rack of the dishwasher but not the bottom, so the clean dishes have gotten all mixed up with the dirty ones - and now you want to have sex?

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

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

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

Lorrie Moore
Certainly bitter emotions can fuel art—all kinds of emotions do.

Lorrie Moore
She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

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
The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riveted, but in separate narratives, and so our interactions seemed weird and richly meaningless, like the characters in a Tennessee Williams play, with their bursting unimportant, but spell-bindingly mad speeches.

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
She was in bed, a book propped in her lap — a biography of a French feminist, which she was reading for the hairdo information.

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

Lorrie Moore
Writing is both the excursion into and the excursion out of one's life. That is the queasy paradox of the artistic life. It is the thing that, like love, removes one both painfully and deliciously from the ordinary shape of existence. It joins another queasy paradox: that life is both an amazing, hilarious, blessed gift and that it is also intolerable.

Lorrie Moore
Her gaze dropped to her hands, which had started to move around nervously, independently, like small rodents kept as pets.

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

Lorrie Moore
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.

Lorrie Moore
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.

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

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
He didn't like to travel much, but he didn't mind it in other people.

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
I've come to realize that life, while being everything, is also strangely not much. Except when the light shines on it a different way and then you realize it's a lot after all!

Lorrie Moore