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7c62924
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The whiskey was going down sweet. That was what happened after a while, with no meal to assist -- it had to do the food work on its own. "There. We talked about death." "That's talking about death?" --
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Lorrie Moore |
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96f7236
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You always say that," said Evan, "but then you go on your trips and vacations and then you settle back into things and then you're quiet for a while and then you say you're fine, you're busy, and then after a while you say you're going crazy again, and you start all over."
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Lorrie Moore |
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221b5cd
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She liked her pieces to have something from every time of day in them -- she didn't trust things written in the morning only -- so she reread and rewrote painstakingly. No part of a day -- its moods, its light -- was allowed to dominate. She hung on to a piece for a year sometimes, revising at all hours, until the entirety of a day had registered there.
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Lorrie Moore |
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4c5112f
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She wore a lot of gray-green corduroy. She had been under the impression that it brought out her eyes, those shy stars.
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Lorrie Moore |
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b2e304b
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She kept wandering in and out of the rooms, wondering where she had put things. She went downstairs into the basement for no reason at all except that it amused her to own a basement. It also amused her to own a tree. Her parents, in Maryland, had been very pleased that one of their children had at last been able to afford real estate, and when she closed on the house they sent her flowers with a congratulations card.
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Lorrie Moore |
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ddf0853
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Then, when it didn't crash, when you succeeded in keeping it aloft with your own worthlessness, all you had to do was stagger off, locate your luggage, and, by the time a cab arrived, come up with a persuasive reason to go on living.
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Lorrie Moore |
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509dea0
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Zoe tried to sound like an older sister.
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Lorrie Moore |
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df141d1
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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 few minutes remaining, learn, perhaps, what his last name was, and what he did for a living, though probably there was already to..
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Lorrie Moore |
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26aa7bf
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No, I'm not Jewish," she said archly, staring him down, to teach him, to teach him this: "Are you?" "Yes," he said. He studied her eyes. "Oh," she said. "Not many of us in this part of the world, so I thought I'd ask." "Yes." She felt an embarrassed sense of loss, as if something that should have been hers but wasn't had been taken away, legally, by the police."
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Lorrie Moore |
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00e6a94
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We don't do that in New York," rasped Odette. She cleared her throat. "No?" Pinky smiled and put his hand on her thigh. "No, it's, um, the cash machines. You just... you wait at them. Forever. Your whole life you're just always" -- her hand sliced the air--"there."
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Lorrie Moore |
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13f482e
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We got hard hearts," she said with an accent that wasn't really any particular accent at all. She wasn't good at accents."
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Lorrie Moore |
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287e2ee
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How quickly bodies came to love each other, promise themselves to each other always, without asking permission. From the mind! If only she could give up her mind, let her heart swell, inflamed, her brain stepping out for whole days, whole seasons, her work shrinking to limericks.
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mind
heart
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Lorrie Moore |
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232dacb
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She gave him books of poetry: Wordsworth, Whitman, all the W's. When she'd ask him how he liked them, he would say, "Fine. I'm on page..." and then he would tell her what page he was on and how many pages he'd accomplished that day."
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Lorrie Moore |
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daf0ef7
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The turkeys I eat are raised on farms. They're different. They've signed on the dotted line.
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Lorrie Moore |
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5f77a30
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Bucks, doe -- thank God everything boils down to money, I always say." "During mating season the doe constructs a bed for herself, and then she urinates all around the outside of it. That's how she gets her mate." "So that's it," murmured Odette. "I was always peeing in the bed."
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humour
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Lorrie Moore |
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665489c
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it would be a combination of comfort and surprise an audience might appreciate.
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Lorrie Moore |
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5edc942
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All this wandering that you do," he said, leaning in the window, his face white as a cream cheese, his scar the carved zigzag of a snowmobile across a winter lake. Wind blew handsomely through his hair. "How will anyone ever get close to you?" "I don't know," she said. She shook his hand through the window and then put on her gloves."
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Lorrie Moore |
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0aeb4a1
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So I needed to be womanised. I was losing my sheen.
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Lorrie Moore |
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802ba8c
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Years later, when they were killed in a car crash on the Farm to Market Road, and the Nell-that-never-lived died with them, Olena, numbly rearranging the letters of her own name on the envelopes of the sympathy cards she received, discovered what the letters spelled: Olena; Alone.
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Lorrie Moore |
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7b840a8
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You were never to say you weren't "fine, thank you -- and yourself?" You were supposed to be Heidi. You were supposed to lug goat milk up the hills and not think twice. Heidi did not complain. Heidi did not do things like stand in front of the new IBM photocopier saying, "If this fucking Xerox machine breaks on me one more time, I'm going to slit my wrists."
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Lorrie Moore |
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d7fd6d0
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There is something comforting, thinks Mack, in embracing someone the same size as you.
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Lorrie Moore |
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caddcd6
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Do you think people can be rehabilitated and forgiven?" "Sure! Look at Ollie North." "Well, he lost that Senate race. He was not sufficiently forgiven." "But he got some votes," Jan insisted.
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humor
lorrie-moore
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Lorrie Moore (Author) |
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ffb89bf
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I am thinking not only of my own body here, that unbeguilable, broken basket, that stiff meringue. I am not, Patrick, thinking only of myself, my lost troupe, my empty bed. 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, the..
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Lorrie Moore |
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39d776f
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Oh," she said. "I wasn't going to ask, but then you never said anything about it, so I thought I'd ask." "How about you?" "Not me," said Odette. She had a poem about marriage. It began, Marriage is the death you want to die, and in front of audiences she never read it with much conviction. Usually she swung her foot back and forth through the whole thing."
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Lorrie Moore |
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dfec743
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She should stay here with him, unorphan him with love's unorphaning, live wise and simple in a world monstrous enough for years of whores and death, and poems of whores and death, so monstrous how could one live in it at all? One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.
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Lorrie Moore |
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bdc7273
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She would turn from him in bed, her hands under the pillow, the digital clock peeling back the old skins of numbers.
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Lorrie Moore |
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7b2d81b
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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 go and stop.
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Lorrie Moore |
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4df02a8
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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 drinking my wine too quickly.
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Lorrie Moore |
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743a743
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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 drinking my wine too quickly.
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Lorrie Moore |
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2dcb70e
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Tears, she had once been told, were designed to eliminate toxins, and they poured down her face and slimed her neck and gathered in the recesses of her collarbones and she had to be careful never to lie back and let them get into her ears, which might cause the toxins to return and start over. Of course, the rumor of toxins turned out not to be true. Tears were quite pure.
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Lorrie Moore |
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068f982
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Unless you have a life of great importance," she said, regrets are stupid, crumpled-up tickets to a circus that has already left town."
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Lorrie Moore |
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1f85781
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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.
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Lorrie Moore |
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6f98760
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He started not to mind it, to feel he was suited in some ways to solitude, to the near weightlessness of no one but himself holding things down. He began to prefer talking on the phone to actually getting together with someone, preferred the bodilessness of it, and started to turn down social engagements. He didn't want to actually sit across from someone in a restaurant, look at their face, and eat food. He wanted to turn away, not deal wi..
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Lorrie Moore |
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952acf3
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I was already becoming a woman who sized up another one fast--I was becoming typical.
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Lorrie Moore |
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681065a
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There seemed nothing so true as a yellow tree.
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Lorrie Moore |
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28a02b4
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in an attempt at extroversion, she had worn a tunic with large slices of watermelon depicted on the front. What had she been thinking of?
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Lorrie Moore |
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570ac33
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Through college she had been a feminist--basically: she shaved her legs, but just not often enough, she liked to say.
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Lorrie Moore |
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78ce008
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I would be a genius now," Quilty has said three times already, "if only I'd memorized Shakespeare instead of Lulu." "If only," says Mack. Mack himself would be a genius now if only he had been born a completely different person. But what could you do? He'd read in a magazine once that geniuses were born only to women over thirty; his own mother had been twenty-nine. Damn! So fucking close!"
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Lorrie Moore |
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052995d
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Quilty grimaces. "I don't like what comes after 'dicker.' " "What is that?" Quilty sighs. "Dickest. I mean, really: it's not a contest!"
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Lorrie Moore |
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a643d23
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It broke her heart that they had come to this: if one knew the future, all the unexpected glimpses of the beloved, one might have trouble finding the courage to go on. This was probably the reason nine-tenths of the human brain had been rendered useless: to make you stupidly intrepid. One was working with only the animal brain, the Pringle brain. The wizard-god brain, the one that could see the future and move objects without touching them,..
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Lorrie Moore |
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4b99475
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But I keep thinking love should be like a tree. You look at trees and they've got bumps and scars from tumors, infestations, what have you, but they're still growing. Despite the bumps and bruises, they're--straight.
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Lorrie Moore |
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864f335
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He stepped back, away from her. He shook his head in disbelief. "You know, I shouldn't try to go out with career women. You're all stricken. A guy can really tell what life has done to you. I do better with women who have part-time jobs." "Oh, yes?" said Zoe. She had once read an article entitled "Professional Women and the Demographics of Grief." Or no, it was a poem: If there were a lake, the moonlight would dance across it in conniption..
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Lorrie Moore |
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87e9d7c
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One of the problems with people in Chicago, she remembered, was that they were never lonely at the same time.
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loneliness
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Lorrie Moore |
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9c9cfc4
|
You are too gifted a person to be living in a state that borders on North Dakota.
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Lorrie Moore |