Lorrie Moore - You Quotes

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Begin to wonder what you do write about. Or if you have anything to say. Or even if there is such a thing as a thing to say. Limit these thoughts to no more than ten minutes a day; like sit-ups, they can make you thin

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
A story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.

Lorrie Moore
Make a list of all the lovers you've ever had. Warren Lasher Ed "Rubberhead" Catapano Charles Deats or Keats Alfonse Tuck it in your pocket. Leave it lying around, conspicuously. Somehow you lose it. Make "mislaid" jokes to yourself. Make another list.

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
You chose love like a belief, a faith, a place, a box for one's heart to knock against like a spook in the house.

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

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

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

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
No matter that you anticipate a thing; you get so used to it as part of the future that its actuality, its arrival, its force and presence, startles you, takes you by surprise, as would a ghost suddenly appearing in the room wearing familiar perfume and boots.

Lorrie Moore
When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet.

Lorrie Moore
For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.

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
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
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
Blasts from the past were like the rooms one entered and re-entered in dreams: they would not stay nailed down. When you returned to them, they had changed - they suddenly had more space or a tilt or a door that had not been there before. New people were milling around, the floors undulated, and the sun shone newly, strangely in the windows, or through the now blasted-open ceiling, or else it shone not at all, as if having fled the sky.

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

Lorrie Moore
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.

Lorrie Moore
Love drains you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight. You are like a house slowly losing its electricity, the fans slowing, the lights dimming and flickering; the clocks stop and go and stop.

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

Lorrie Moore
I feared Sarah was one of those women who instead of laughing said, "That's funny," or instead of smiling said, "That's interesting," or instead of saying, "You are a stupid blithering idiot," said, "Well I think it's a little more complicated than that.

Lorrie Moore