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741a516
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But I was not especially skilled at minding children for long spells; I grew bored, perhaps like my own mother. After I spent too much time playing their games, my mind grew peckish and longed to lose itself in some book I had in my backpack. I was ever hopeful of early bedtimes and long naps.
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Lorrie Moore |
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ff4cd49
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The key to marriage, she concluded, was just not to take the thing too personally.
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Lorrie Moore |
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9108271
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When affection fell on its ass, politeness could step up.
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Lorrie Moore |
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29e530e
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The situation was not easy for her, they knew. Once, at the start of last semester, she had skipped into her lecture hall singing "Getting to Know You" - both verses. At the request of the dean the chairman had called her into his office, but did not ask her for an explanation, not really. He asked her how she was and then smiled in an avuncular way. She said, "Fine," and he studied the way she said it, her front teeth catching on the insid..
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Lorrie Moore |
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733cedd
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Tell him not to smoke in your apartment. Tell him to get out. At first he protests. But slowly, slowly, he leaves, pulling up the collar on his expensive beige raincoat, like an old and haggard Robert Culp. Slam the door like Bette Davis. Love drains from 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 g..
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Lorrie Moore |
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3fb60eb
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Although Kit and Rafe had met in the peace movement, marching, organizing, making no nukes signs, now they wanted to kill each other. They had become, also, a little pro-nuke.
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Lorrie Moore |
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3ee5066
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Anyone who's read all of Proust plus The Man withour Qualities is bound t be missing out on a few other titles.
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literature
reading
remembrance-of-things-past
robert-musil
the-man-without-qualities
proust
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Lorrie Moore |
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bef4d8d
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We curl up on the couch together, under a blanket, whisper I love you, I missed you, confusing tenses I think.
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Lorrie Moore |
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6a07bf5
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It was strange, this toxic little vein, strange to stand above it, looking down at night, in a dangerous neighborhood, as if they were in love and entitled to such adventures.
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love-story
entitled-in-love
toxic
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Lorrie Moore |
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2b3375c
|
I don't have a love life. I have a like life.' Mamie smiled. She thought how nice that might be, to be peacefully free from love...
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love-story
love-life
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Lorrie Moore |
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8b37942
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Why do you haunt me? You, like a tattoo on my tongue, like the bay leaf at the bottom of every pan. You who sprawled out beside me and sang my horoscope to a Schubert symphony, something about travel and money again, and we lay there, both of our breaths bad, both of our underwear dangling elastic, and then you turned toward me with a gaze like two matches, putting the horoscope aside, you traced my buried ribs with your index finger, linge..
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love
inspirational
sarcasm
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Lorrie Moore |
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19413c1
|
Which is it," she asked. "Is it CLIToris or clotORis?" I didn't know. Why didn't I know? "It may depend on which you have," I said."
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Lorrie Moore |
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123571b
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I wished for eternal and intriguing muteness. I would be the Mysterious Dumb Girl, the Enigmatic Elf. The human voice no longer interested me.
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Lorrie Moore |
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e8b40f1
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Like true friends, they take no hardy or elegant stance loosely choreographed from some broad perspective. They get right in there and mutter "Jesus Christ!" and shake their heads."
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Lorrie Moore |
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5512620
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I am stealing more and more money. I keep it in my top drawer beneath my underwear, along with my diaphragm and lipstick and switchblade--these are things a woman needs
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Lorrie Moore |
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21d42b9
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I would look out upon the wildflowers, the mulch of swamps and leaves, the spring mosses greening on the rocks, or the boulderous mountains of street-black snow, whatever season it happened to be- my mittens clotted with ice, or my hands grimy with marsh mud- and from the back of my larynx I'd send part of my voice out toward the horizon and part of it straight up toward the sky. There must have been some pain in me. I wanted to howl and fl..
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Lorrie Moore |
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8eaa1d8
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Sometimes as I'm drifting toward sleep, in the beginnings of that dissolution, I wonder where I am, when this is, and realize that at these moments I could be anywhere, anytime, for all I know: eight and napping in the trailer, my broken arm in a cast, or thirteen at night clutching a pillow to my neck, or twenty in the arms of my boyfriend, or twenty-seven in the arms of my husband, or thirty-three next to my imaginary daughter; at every p..
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Lorrie Moore |
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c5b9b95
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Philosophers are good at parties but not for cleaning up after.
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Lorrie Moore |
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8c07015
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The functional disenchantment, the sweet habit of each other, had begun to put lines around her mouth, lines that looked like quotation marks--as if everything she said had already been said before...[the cat] was accustomed to much nestling and appreciation and drips from the faucet, though sometimes she would vanish outside, and they would not see her for days, only to spy her later, in the yard, dirty and matted, chomping a vole or eatin..
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Lorrie Moore |
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f03ceed
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Do not resent her. Think about the situation, for instance, when you take the last trash bag from its box: you must throw out the box by putting it in that very trash bag. What was once contained, now must contain. The container, then, becomes the contained, the enveloped, the held.
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Lorrie Moore |
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4e29eed
|
You have a choice," she told the class. "The whorish emptiness of lies or the straightlaced horrors of truth."
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truth
truth-and-lies
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Lorrie Moore |
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6156b33
|
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.
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teenagers
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Lorrie Moore |
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3f6487c
|
When I was little, I didn't understand that you could change a few sounds in a name or a phrase and have it mean something entirely different. When I told teachers my name was Benna and they said, "Donna who?" I would say, "Donna Gilbert." I thought close was good enough, that sloppiness was generally built into the language. I thought Bing Crosby and Bill Crosby were the same person. That Buddy Holly and Billie Holiday were the same person..
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Lorrie Moore |
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a70a85c
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The faces of the panel listening were the very embodiment of skepticism made flesh.
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Lorrie Moore |
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c53a334
|
If we were still English we'd be drinking more and driving on the wrong side of the road - pretty much what people do on the Fourth of July anyway.
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Lorrie Moore |
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e62d293
|
We used awesome the way the British used brilliant: for anything at all. Perhaps . . . it was a kind of antidepressant: inflated rhetoric to keep the sorry truth at bay.
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Lorrie Moore |
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80dea3a
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This was supposed to be the Presidential Suite," she said, gazing into the room at the holes in the wall. well, even presidents get shot," I said.
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Lorrie Moore |
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6e95e3e
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She had to learn not to be afraid of a man, the way, in your childhood, you learned not to be afraid of an earthworm or a bug. Often, when she spoke to men at parties, she rushed things in her mind. As the man politely blathered on, she would fall in love, marry, then find herself in a bitter custody battle with him for the kids and hoping for a reconciliation, so that despite all his betrayals she might no longer despise him, and in the fe..
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Lorrie Moore |
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f0a2bfd
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I tried not to think of my one excursion to Whole Foods, over a year ago, where I found myself paralyzed by all the special food for special people, whose special murmurings seemed to be saying, "Out of my way! I want a Tofurkey!"
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Lorrie Moore |
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da5a230
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You only live at once." Which seemed to her all the more reason to be careful, to take it easy, to have an ordinary life."
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Lorrie Moore |
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204b57e
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I tried to live cautiously - or eventually learned to try to live - in a spirit of regret prevention, and I could not see how Bonnie could accomplish such a thing in this situation. Regret - operatic, oceanic, fathomless - seemed to stretch before her in every direction. No matter which path she took, regret would stain her feet and scratch her arms and rain down on her, lightlessly and lifelong. It had already begun.
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Lorrie Moore |
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a340d6f
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Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real.
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Lorrie Moore |
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f37e879
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This ceremony of approval was a charade - everything had been decided before we got here - and as with all charades it was wanly ebullient, necessary, and thin.
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Lorrie Moore |
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13f3e55
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The later-afternoon air of our exhalations hung in brief clouds before us. The thought balloon of my own breath said, "How have I found myself here?" It was not a theological question. It was one of transportation and neurology."
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Lorrie Moore |
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c7ade11
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Tone was all. Gift wrap was all. Perfect the wrap, and you could put whatever you wanted in the box. You could put firecrackers. You could put dog shit.
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Lorrie Moore |
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2e97bd5
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I felt sorry for Mary-Emma and all she was going through, every day waking up to something new. Though maybe that was what childhood was. But I couldn't quite recall that being the case for me. And perhaps she would grow up with a sense that incompetence was all around here, and it was entirely possible I would be instrumental in that. She would grow up with love, but no sense that the people who loved her knew what they were doing - the op..
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Lorrie Moore |
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8a49512
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Sarah'nin gulmek yerine, "Komik," ya da gulumsemek yerine, "Ilginc," ya da "Aptal zirva geri zekalinin tekisin," demek yerine, "Sey, sanirim bu ondan biraz daha karmasik," diyen kadinlardan olmasindan korktum. Oyle insanlarin yaninda ne yapacagimi hic bilemezdim, ozellikle de siz konustuktan sonra gizemli bir sekilde "Anliyorum," diyenlerin. Genellikle sadece susardim."
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Lorrie Moore |
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daf77ce
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What was education for, if not to acquire contradictions? At least it looked like that to me.
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Lorrie Moore |
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43ad0c0
|
Are you anywhere near Champaign-Urbana?" "No." "I went there once. I thought from its name that it would be a different kind of place. I kept saying to myself, 'Champagne, urbah na, champagne, urbah na! Champagne! Urbana'" He sighed. "It was just this thing in the middle of a field." --
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Lorrie Moore |
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6d2d625
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Her voice was husky, vibrating, slightly flat, coming in just under each note like a saucer under a cup.
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Lorrie Moore |
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d536666
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They looked at her quizzically, came at her with assumptions, presumptions, what they believed was intimate knowledge of her. She felt unarmed, by comparison; disadvantaged.
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writing
self-exposed
vulnerability
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Lorrie Moore |
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667c577
|
But it would be like going to Heaven and not finding any of your friends there. Her life would go all beatific and empty in the eyes.
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living
life
where-you-live
home
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Lorrie Moore |
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09ec692
|
1976. The Bicentennial. In the laundromat, you want for the time on your coins to run out. Through the porthole of the dryer, you watch your bedeviled towels and sheets leap and fall. The radio station piped in from the ceiling plays slow, sad Motown; it encircles you with the desperate hopefulness of a boy at a dance, and it makes you cry. When you get back to your apartment, dump everything on your bed. Your mother is knitting crookedly: ..
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Lorrie Moore |
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9dc0d97
|
Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain...
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life
|
Lorrie Moore |