|
b0b95e7
|
Irrigation sprinklers like the skeletons of brontosauruses. -Tassie Keltjin
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
b942061
|
This is Quilty's audition ritual: whenever he feels it is time for it, he calls upon himself to audition for love. He has no script, no reliable sense of stage, just a faceful of his heart's own greasepaint and a relentless need for applause.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
2570fd7
|
Una vida asi requeria una autoestima exagerada. Suponia tener cantidades excesivas de esperanza y desesperacion, y ponerlas al tuntun, como paises tercermundistas del continente de las emociones.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
2e00f09
|
I feel his lack of love for me.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
d5a05e4
|
Bummer,' said Ira, his new word for "I must remain as neutral as possible" and "Your mother's a whore."
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
c510e74
|
Let's make our own way,' says the Mother, 'and not in this boat.
|
|
independence
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
dc8c490
|
It's two against one out here; we just keep taking turns.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
684f84f
|
I was Baptist and had always prayed, in a damp squint, for things not to happen. Sils was a Catholic, and so she prayed for things to happen, for things to come true. She prayed for love here and now. I prayed for no guns.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
025c4ef
|
it seemed one could just say are you serious? for the rest of existence and it would never be unjustified and would always have to be answered and so would keep the conversation going
|
|
|
lorrie moore |
|
d406025
|
Denial, when one was accused, was a life force, and would trump any desire to confess. Perhaps this was the animal strength of the psychopathic brain. Or the psychopathy of the animal brain. An admission of guilt would knock the strength right out of you--making it easier for them to twist your arms behind you and put the handcuffs on.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
c816c61
|
From Charades: when she was younger she was a frustrated mother, so she is pleased when her children act as is they don't remember
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
f802529
|
As a feminist you mustn't blame the other woman," a neighbor told her. "As a feminist I request that you no longer speak to me," Kit replied.)" --
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
4629c33
|
I remember thinking that once there had been a time when women died of brain fevers caught from the prick of their hat pins, and that still, after all this time, it was hard being a girl, lugging around these bodies that were never right - wounds that needed fixing, heads that needed hats, corrections, corrections.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
1222bb1
|
he had had some eye work done: a lift to remove the puff and bloat; he would rather look startled and insane than look fifty-six.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
a950a1c
|
To the right, the clouds have more shape and against the blue look like the figures of a Wedgwood dish. What a fine fucking bowl beneath which they have all been caught and asked to swim out their days! Look at it this way," people used to say to Mack. "Things could be worse"--a bumper sticker for a goldfish or a bug. And it wasn't wrong -- it just wasn't the point."
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
b0bda70
|
At all the funerals for love, love had its neat trick of making you mourn it so much, it reappeared. Popped right up from the casket. Or, if it didn't reappear itself, it sent a relative of startling resemblance, a thin and charming twin, which you took home with you to fatten and cradle, nuzzle and scold.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
acc5c4b
|
Good God," cries the Mother. Everything inside her suddenly begins to cower and shrink, a thinning of bones. Perhaps this is a soldier's readiness, but it has the whiff of death and defeat. It feels like a heart attack, a failure of will and courage, a power failure: a failure of everything. Her face, when she glimpses it in a mirror, is cold and bloated with shock, her eyes scarlet and shrunk. She has already started to wear sunglasses ind..
|
|
parenthood
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
60bf39f
|
It's a fast but wimpy tumor," he explains. "It typically metastasizes to the lung." He rattles off some numbers, time frames, risk statistics. Fast but wimpy: the Mother tries to imagine this combination of traits, tries to think and think, and can only come up with Claudia Osk from the fourth grade, who blushed and almost wept when called on in class, but in gym could outrun everyone in the quarter-mile fire-door-to-fence dash. The Mother ..
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
6929815
|
It's bad enough when they refer to medical science as 'an inexact science,' " says the Mother. "But when they start referring to it as 'an art,' I get extremely nervous."
|
|
medicine
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
9704625
|
Even his I love you's," she said, "were like tiny daggers, like little needles or safety pins. Beware of a man who says he loves you but is incapable of a passionate confession; of melting into a sob."
|
|
love
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
1f6fa48
|
This is a political New Year's Eve," says Albert. "We're here to protest the new year, protest the old; generally get a petition going to Father Time."
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
0993559
|
Ever since Albert was denied promotion to full-professor rank, his articles on Flannery O'Connor ("A Good Man Really Is Hard to Find," "Everything That Rises Must Indeed Converge," and "The Totemic South: The Violent Actually Do Bear It Away!") failing to meet with collegial acclaim, he has become determined to serve others, passing out the notices and memoranda, arranging the punch and cookies at various receptions."
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
4f78d1b
|
Blank is to heartache as forest is to bench.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
7d3beb1
|
Before he wrote about them," said Quilty, pretending to read the guidebook out loud, "Hemingway shot his characters. It was considered an unusual but not unheard-of creative method. Still, even within literary circles, it is not that widely discussed."
|
|
writing
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
69b756a
|
The prospect of a war has seized his brain. It engages some old, ongoing terror in him. As a former soldier, he still believes in armies. But he believes in armies at rest, armies relaxing, armies shopping at the PX, armies eating supper in the mess hall.
|
|
war
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
b777060
|
She gazed over at her mother and took a deep breath. Perhaps her mother had never shown Abby affection, not really, but she had given her a knack for solitude, with its terrible lurches outward, and its smooth glide back to peace. Abby would toast her for that. It was really the world that was one's brutal mother, the one that nursed and neglected you, and your own mother was only your sibling in that world. Abby lifted her glass. "May the ..
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
307674a
|
You live if you dance to the voice that ails you.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
0eaa61b
|
The night before, a whole day could have shape and design. But when it was upon you, it could vanish tragically to air.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
5450e37
|
She had bought several plain pine chests to use as love seats or boot boxes, but they came to look to her more and more like children's coffins, so she returned them.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
0674d77
|
Later on in life you will learn that writers are merely open, helpless texts with no real understanding of what they have written and therefore must half-believe anything and everything that is said of them.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
0b2eddf
|
He had never been involved with the mentally ill before, but he now felt more than ever that there should be strong international laws against them being too good-looking.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
0b9dbd8
|
How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always 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 a..
|
|
story
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
1156f9e
|
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." She'd stood there for years, blinking and befuddled, brushing the can with the brush. Still,"
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
298803c
|
Why not admit history's power to divide and destroy? Why attach ourselves to the age-old stories in the belief that they are truer than the new ones? By living in the past, you always know what comes next, and that robs you of surprises. It exhausts and warps the mind. We are lucky simply to be alive together; why get differentiating and judgmental about who is here among us? Thank God there is anyone at all.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
2464629
|
Okay, I'll just go on to the next card." He picks one up, pretending to read. "It says here, 'Darling, is there life on Mars? Yes or no.' " Mack has gone back to thinking about the paintings. "I say no," he says absently. "Hmmm," says Quilty, putting the card down. "I think the answer is yes. Look at it this way: they're sure there are ice crystals. And where there is ice, there is water. And where there is water, there is waterfront proper..
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
020d958
|
I steal back into dreams of you, your unmade bed a huge open-faced sandwich.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
e005828
|
The speech she made was done in the back, alone, like little shoes cobbled by an elf: spider is to web as weaver is to blank. That one was hers. She was proud of that. Also, blank is to heartache as forest is to bench. But
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
a348895
|
In the Dictionary 'lumpy jaw' comes just before 'lunacy,' but in life there are no such clues. Suddenly, for no reason, you might start to dribble from the mouth, to howl peevishly at the moon. You might start quoting your mother, out loud and with conviction. You might lose your friends to the most uninspired of deaths. You might one day wake up and find yourself teaching at a community college; there will have been nothing to warn you. Yo..
|
|
disappointment
literature
lunacy
midlife-crisis
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
4e49fc2
|
What is beautiful is seized," my mother said a final time, speaking of my father, whom she said had been destroyed by too many women, a heart picked over, scratched at, taken, lost. "It came to me in bulky bandages, seeming much larger, much more than it really was."
|
|
love
love-quotes
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
7170852
|
On Fridays there were fish fries or boils at which they served "lawyers" (burbot or eelpout), so-called because their hearts were in their butts."
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
abd8d2f
|
A healthy death, like anything -- job promotions or looking younger -- was simply a matter of "feeling good about yourself." Which is where the sedatives came in. Sedate as a mint, a woman could place a happy hand on the shoulder of death and rasp out, "Waddya say, buddy, wanna dance?"
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
c6eeac9
|
She looked pink and beseeching, though essentially she looked the same, as people do despite the fact they have begun to turn into monsters and are about to tell you something that should require horns or fangs or vaulted eyebrows but never apparently does.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
1ddc557
|
Don't mistake a lack of sophistication for sweetness.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |
|
9e35b7b
|
No matter what terror or loveliness the earth could produce--winds, seas--a person could produce the same, lived with the same, lived with all that mixed-up nature swirling inside, every bit.
|
|
|
Lorrie Moore |