|
8e55c73
|
Things, however, rarely happened the way you understood them. Mostly they just sort of drove up alongside what you thought was the case and then moved randomly down some other way.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
81df735
|
I looked in vain for LaRoue, my cruelty toward her now in me like a splinter, where it would sit for years in my helpless memory, the skin growing around; what else can memory do? It can do nothing; It pretends to eat the shrapnel of your acts, yet it cannot swallow or chew.
|
|
memory
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
92de647
|
We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
c5f74b9
|
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 |
|
63d4378
|
But this is the kind of thing that fiction is: it's the unlivable life, the strange room tacked onto the house, the extra moon that is circling the earth unbeknownst to science.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
a368008
|
I cried for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sent out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are true, you do!
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
7810bd3
|
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 |
|
7330e0c
|
Get a Job, she shouted silently to God. Get a real Job.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
1bedd6a
|
Sometimes it seemed that she and rudy were two people attempting to tango, sweating and trying, long after the orchestra had grown tired, long after everyone else had gone home.
|
|
stagnant-relationships
struggles-in-relationships
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
ab87134
|
She had expected a pistol to seem light and natural-a seamless extension of her angry feral self.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
766ed5f
|
On-yez, where are you from, dear?' asked a black-slacked, frosted-haired woman whose skin was papery and melanomic with suntan. 'Originally.' She eyed Agnes's outfit as if it might be what in fact it was: a couple of blue things purchased in a department store in Cedar Rapids. Where am I from?' Agnes said it softly. 'Iowa.' She had a tendency not to speak up. Where?' the woman scowled, bewildered. Iowa,' Agnes repeated loudly. The woman..
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
87bce8f
|
Amber was past tense. We were covering her inanimate face in the white sheet of was.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
f8253a1
|
He calls you occasionally at the office to ask how you are. You doodle numbers and curlicues on the corners of Rolodex cards. Fiddle with your Phi Beta Kappa key. Stare out the window. You always, always, say: "Fine."
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
e79decd
|
I watched my friend Eleanor give birth," she said. "Once you've seen a child born, you realize a baby's not much more than a reconstituted ham and cheese sandwich. Just a little anagram of you and what you've been eating for nine months."
|
|
humor
benna
babies
birth
baby
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
245327b
|
I said nothing. If she wasn't careful, everyone would rush out of her life, life out of a burning building.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
e9b6b9a
|
You can exclude the excluded middle, but when you ride through, on your way to a lonely and more certain place, out the window you'll see everyone you've ever known living there.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
cd83b7c
|
A lie to the faithless is merely a conversation in their language.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
998f1c3
|
Yes," she said. "'I Been Working on the Railroad.'There's just two things I'm worried about with that: the grammar and the use of slave labor."
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
23d8144
|
A match made in heaven - where do you get those? That's what I want to know!
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
7524a7e
|
It's a form of terrorism not to bomb this town.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
473e32a
|
She would try to live life one day at a time, like an alcoholic--drink, don't drink, drink. Perhaps she should take drugs.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
27a16bd
|
We are lucky simply to be alive together; why get differentiating and judgemental about who is here among us? Thank God there is anyone at all.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
1a8086b
|
It reminded me of how children always thought too big; how the world tackled and chiseled them to keep them safe.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
0baccd4
|
They were in performance. They were performing their marriage at me.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
80a921a
|
Win them with your beauty, but catch them off guard with your soul.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
e9db262
|
Tragedies, I was coming to realize through my daily studies in humanities both in and out of the classroom, were a luxury. They were constructions of an affluent society, full of sorrow and truth but without moral function. Stories of the vanquishing of the spirit expressed and underscored a certain societal spirit to spare. The weakening of the soul, the story of the downfall and the failed overcoming - trains missed, letters not received,..
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
fdb9496
|
This was my modest dream come true: unambitious flight. The kind that never even got high enough for a view.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
d313185
|
I used to think that those essentially happy and romantic novels that ended with a wedding were all wrong, that they had left out the most interesting part of the story.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
ca1bca6
|
Beauty could not love you back. People were not what they seemed and certainly not what they said. Madness was contagious. Memory served melancholy. The medieval was not so bad. Gravity was a form of nostalgia. There could be virtue in satirizing virtue. Dwight Eisenhower and Werner von Braun had the exact same mouths. No one loved a loser until he completely lost. The capital of Burma was Rangoon.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
f20fcce
|
The ants are my friends- they're blowing in the wind
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
5468398
|
I guessed that only at the last possible minute did the soul in a determined fashion flee the dying flesh. Who could blame it for its reluctance? We loved our lives more than we ever knew, and at the end felt the bounty of them, as one would say in church, felt even the richness of their missed opportunities, or just understood that they were more than we had realized during the living of them and a lot to give up.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
18ffbd1
|
She tried to smile warmly but wondered if she looked "fakey," something Ariel sometimes accused her of. Ariel had said. "It's like you're trying to be happy out of a book." Millie owned several books about trying to be happy."
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
08c6075
|
John had dreamed so long and hard of this place that he had hoped it right out of existence. Probably no place in the world could withstand such an assault of human wishing.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
e6e9383
|
I felt nothing like a horse, whose instincts I knew were to run and run. I had mostly in life tried to stand still like a glob of coral so as not to be spotted by sharks. But now I had crawled out onto land and was somehow already a horse.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
8660621
|
I had seen this exact same expression and movement before - where? In the future I would come to know that look as the beginning of the end of love - the death of a man's trying. It read as Haughty Fatigue. Like the name of a stripper.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
220326e
|
An agony. The exit like the entrance - but reversed. A palindrome: gut-tug.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
a5a662b
|
it all remained unreadable for him, though reading, he felt, was not a natural thing and should not be done to people. In general, people were not road maps. People were not hieroglyphs or books. They were not stories. A person was a collection of accidents. A person was an infinite pile of rocks with things growing underneath.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
b10b78f
|
Philosophize: you are a mistress, part of a great hysterical you mean historical tradition.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
8734461
|
Mave believed that not being able to see your life clearly, to scrutinize it intelligently, meant that probably you were at the dead center of it, and that couldn't possibly be a bad thing.
|
|
self-awareness
scrutinize
self-realization
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
01f91f4
|
Through all the muck of themselves, the times they had unobligated each other, the anger, the permitted absences, the loneliness grown dangerous, she had always returned to him. He'd had faith in that - abracadabra! But eventually the deadlines set in again. Could you live in the dead excellence of a thing - the stupid mortar of a body, the stubborn husk love had crawled from? Yes, he thought.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
e3c8c96
|
Every family is a family of alligators.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
f0a21b5
|
The catalog showed a man sleeping peacefully while his model-wife read a book in soft but focused light. In real life, however, the light was so intense that the same man would have had to wear sunglasses.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
0c0150c
|
Back at home, days later, feel cranky and tired. Sit on the couch and tell him he's stupid. That you bet he doesn't know who Coriolanus is. That since you moved in you've noticed he rarely reads. He will give you a hurt, hungry-to-learn look, with his James Cagney eyes. He will try to kiss you. Turn your head. Feel suffocated. (from "How")"
|
|
relationships
discontent
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
d8de29a
|
I am thinking of the dancing body's magnificent and ostentatious scorn. This is how we offer ourselves, enter heaven, enter speaking: we say with motion, in space, This is what life's done so far down here; this is all and what and everything it's managed - this body, these bodies, that body - so what do you think, Heaven? What do you fucking think?
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |