Lorrie Moore - Life Quotes

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
A woman had to choose her own particular unhappiness carefully. That was the only happiness in life, to choose the best unhappiness.

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
She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hairbrush and told, "There you go." — Willing

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
Basically, I realized I was living in that awful stage of life between twenty-six to and thirty-seven known as stupidity. It's when you don't know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don't even have a philosophy about all the things you don't know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight.

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

Lorrie Moore
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.

Lorrie Moore
His life seemed to be untacking itself, lying loose about him like a blouse.

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