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173021f
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How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveler's mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indi..
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Lorrie Moore |
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ef3d4c9
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The problem with a beautiful woman is that she makes everyone around her feel hopelessly masculine, which if you're already male to begin with poses no particular problem. But if you're anyone else, your whole sexual identity gets dragged into the principal's office: "So what's this I hear about you prancing around, masquerading as a woman?" You are answerless. You are sitting on your hands. You are praying for your breasts to grow, your ha..
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Lorrie Moore |
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8260309
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And though he continued never to express a single word of love for me, not in any way of his several languages, I could not take a hint. Let the hint be written across the heavens in skywriting done by several planes - I was dense. Even skywriting, well, it wasn't always certain: it might not cover the whole entire sky, or some breeze might smudge it, so who could really say for sure what it said? Even skywriting wouldn't have worked! Sever..
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Lorrie Moore |
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6bded41
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Nothing is a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.
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life
jokes
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Lorrie Moore |
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4638e71
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Love is a fever," she said. "And when you come out of it you'll discover whether you've been lucky - or not."
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Lorrie Moore |
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e983a55
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Things between us were dissolving like an ice cub in a glass: the smaller it got, the faster it disappeared.
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Lorrie Moore |
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057982c
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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.
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Lorrie Moore |
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1b1b29c
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Though she would have preferred long ago to have died, fled, gotten it all over with, the body--Jesus, how the body!--took its time. It possessed its own wishes and nostalgias. You could not just turn neatly into light and slip out the window. You couldn't go like that. Within one's own departing but stubborn flesh, there was only the long, sentimental, piecemeal farewell. The body, hauling sadness, pursued the soul, hobbled after. The bo..
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Lorrie Moore |
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347fd6e
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I tell them dance begins when a moment of hurt combines with a moment of boredom. I tell them it's the body's reaching, bringing air to itself. I tell them that it's the heart's triumph, the victory speech of the feet, the refinement of animal lunge and flight, the purest metaphor of tribe and self. It's life flipping death the bird. I make this stuff up.
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Lorrie Moore |
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8f2a5dd
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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.
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Lorrie Moore |
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a58e393
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This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grow sarcastic.
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love
sacrasm
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Lorrie Moore |
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f4daaaf
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I want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.
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Lorrie Moore |
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a2a57ab
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Pulling through is what people do around here. There is a kind of bravery in their lives that isn't bravery at all. It is automatic, unflinching, a mix of man and machine, consuming and unquestionable obligation meeting illness move for move in a giant even-steven game of chess - an unending round of something that looks like shadowboxing, though between love and death, which is the shadow? "Everyone admires us for our courage," says one ma..
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illness
courage
death
love
death-and-sickness
death-and-love
death-of-a-loved-one
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Lorrie Moore |
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99b2489
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I wondered about the half-life of regret.
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Lorrie Moore |
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2111f51
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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?
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Lorrie Moore |
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df9a275
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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!
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Lorrie Moore |
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2a3ea0e
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This danish is too sweetish to finish.
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Lorrie Moore |
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de171bc
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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.
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Lorrie Moore |
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8b1f34f
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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.
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surprise
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Lorrie Moore |
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fca860d
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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.
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joy
quote
living
life
joys
small-joys
like-life
lorrie-moore
complicated
pressure
short-story
realization
quotes
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Lorrie Moore |
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8d62f04
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My new apartment might be a place where there are lots of children. They might gather on my porch to play, and when I step out for groceries, they will ask me, "Hi, do you have any kids?" and then, "Why not, don't you like kids?" "I like kids," I will explain. "I like kids very much." And when I almost run over them with my car, in my driveway, I will feel many different things."
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kids
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Lorrie Moore |
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a61a029
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This was love, I supposed, and eventually I would come to know it. Someday it would choose me and I would come to know its spell, for long stretches and short, two times, maybe three, and then quite probably it would choose me never again.
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Lorrie Moore |
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04740d3
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Life was unendurable, and yet everywhere it was endured.
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Lorrie Moore |
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b672629
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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.
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Lorrie Moore |
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67f0995
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Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain, hope played like a playing card upon another hope, a wish for kindnesses and mercies to emerge like kings and queens in an unexpected change of the game. One could hold the cards oneself or not: they would land the same regardless.
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lorrie-moore
luck
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Lorrie Moore |
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1e0db5a
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One should never turn one's back on a vivid imagination.
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Lorrie Moore |
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6a273e5
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Like everyone he knew, he could discern the hollowness in people's charm only when it was directed at someone other than himself.
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Lorrie Moore |
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a21f1c6
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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.
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Lorrie Moore |
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a768ef0
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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.
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Lorrie Moore |
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11ead9e
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Mostly, however, he had books about love. He believed in studying his own heart this way.
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Lorrie Moore |
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8c17ed0
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It is unacceptable, all the stunned and anxious missing a person is asked to endure in life. It is not to be endured, not really.
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Lorrie Moore |
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62bad39
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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.
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Lorrie Moore |
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e13e73f
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My grandmother, who, when I visited, stared at me with the staggering, arrogant stare of the dying, the wise vapidity of the already gone; she refused to occupy the features of her face.
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Lorrie Moore |
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d537696
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What makes humans human is precisely that they do not know the future. That is why they do the fateful and amusing things they do: who can say how anything will turn out? Therein lies the only hope for redemption, discovery, and-let's be frank--fun, fun, fun! There might be things people will get away with. And not just motel towels. There might be great illicit loves, enduring joy, faith-shaking accidents with farm machinery. But you have ..
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life
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Lorrie Moore |
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528f39f
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She had already--carefully, obediently--stepped through all the stages of bereavement: anger, denial, bargaining, Haagen-Dazs, rage.
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Lorrie Moore |
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0b8dd26
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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 arbitrary place that happened to be yours.
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Lorrie Moore |
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322e389
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Marriage, she felt, was a fine arrangement generally, except that one never got it generally. One got it very, very specifically.
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Lorrie Moore |
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c1dd89a
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Love is art, not truth. It's like painting a scenery.' These are the things one takes from mothers. Once they die, of course, you get the strand of pearls, the blue quilt, some of the original wedding gifts - a tray shellacked with the invitation, an old rusted toaster - but the touches and the words and the moaning the night she dies, these are what you seize, save, carry around in little invisible envelopes, opening them up quickly, like ..
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Lorrie Moore |
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d93f3ad
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It was true. Men could be with whomever they pleased. But women had to date better, kinder, richer, and bright, bright, bright, or else people got embarrassed.
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feminism
relationships
feminism-gender
gender-roles
gender
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Lorrie Moore |
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dffb898
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She was wearing an old summer dress as a nightgown, but in the mornings it could work as a dress again, if you just tossed a cardigan over it and put on shoes. In this risky manner, she knew, insanity could encroach.
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Lorrie Moore |
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6a85e9a
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If you were alone when you were born, alone when you were dying, really absolutely alone when you were dead, why "learn to be alone" in between? If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You didn't have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell off the bike: I was drinki..
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Lorrie Moore |
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245dccc
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So much urgent and lifelike love went rumbling around underground and died there, never got expressed at all, so let some errant inconvenient attraction have its way. There was so little time
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love
inconvenience
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Lorrie Moore |
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16c5830
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Forgiveness lives alone and far off down the road, but bitterness and art are close, gossipy neighbors, sharing the same clothesline, hanging out their things, getting their laundry confused.
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Lorrie Moore |
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07f7e58
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Everyone these days was defensive about their lives. Everyone had settled.
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people-today
settling
|
Lorrie Moore |