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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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 | ||
| 6bd8f94 | You can always find a shock of beauty or meaning in what life you have left. | BJ Miller | ||
| 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 | ||
| 7c62924 | 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?" -- | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 96f7236 | 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." | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 221b5cd | 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. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 4c5112f | She wore a lot of gray-green corduroy. She had been under the impression that it brought out her eyes, those shy stars. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| b2e304b | 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. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| ddf0853 | 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. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 509dea0 | Zoe tried to sound like an older sister. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| df141d1 | 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.. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 26aa7bf | 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." | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 00e6a94 | 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." | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 13f482e | We got hard hearts," she said with an accent that wasn't really any particular accent at all. She wasn't good at accents." | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 287e2ee | 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. | heart mind | Lorrie Moore | |
| 232dacb | 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." | Lorrie Moore | ||
| daf0ef7 | The turkeys I eat are raised on farms. They're different. They've signed on the dotted line. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 5f77a30 | 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." | humour | Lorrie Moore | |
| 665489c | it would be a combination of comfort and surprise an audience might appreciate. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| e69aadf | Equality is the measure of all things, and bad behavior is less bad if everyone indulges in it. | Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist) | ||
| 5edc942 | 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." | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 0aeb4a1 | So I needed to be womanised. I was losing my sheen. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 802ba8c | 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. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 7b840a8 | 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." | Lorrie Moore | ||
| d7fd6d0 | There is something comforting, thinks Mack, in embracing someone the same size as you. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| caddcd6 | 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. | humor lorrie-moore | Lorrie Moore (Author) | |
| ffb89bf | 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.. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 39d776f | 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." | Lorrie Moore | ||
| dfec743 | 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. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| bdc7273 | She would turn from him in bed, her hands under the pillow, the digital clock peeling back the old skins of numbers. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 7b2d81b | 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. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 4df02a8 | 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. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 743a743 | 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. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 2dcb70e | 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. | Lorrie Moore | ||
| 068f982 | Unless you have a life of great importance," she said, regrets are stupid, crumpled-up tickets to a circus that has already left town." | Lorrie Moore |