Lorrie Moore Quotes

Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.

This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.

For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things.

Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father. And you know what they say? I could never do that!'

If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

You chose love like a belief, a faith, a place, a box for one's heart to knock against like a spook in the house.

(Such a life)engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart.

Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.

But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.

Forgiveness lives alone and far off down the road, but bitterness and art are close, gossipy neighbors, sharing the same clothesline, hanging out their things, getting their laundry confused.

To write a short story, you have to be able to stay up all night.

You are unhappy because you believe in such a thing as happy.

I don’t go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

I had never feared insomnia before--like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?

Pleasantness was the machismo of the Midwest. There was something athletic about it. You flexed your face into a smile and let it hover there like the dare of a cat.

This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she'd noticed a lot in people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. But they recycled their newspapers!

Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself.

If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry.

I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it.

Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.

All the world's a stage we're going through.

Editing is just ongoing. I don't count drafts, or know what would fully constitute a draft. But I try to fix as I go. And there's always more to fix.

Love is the answer, said the songs, and that's OK. It was OK, I supposed, as an answer. But no more than that. It was not a solution; it wasn't really even an answer, just a reply.

Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.

I've come to realize that life, while being everything, is also strangely not much. Except when the light shines on it a different way and then you realize it's a lot after all!

You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.

When she packed up to leave, she knew that she was saying goodbye to something important, which was not that bad, in a way, because it meant that at least you had said hello to it to begin with.

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." -- Willing

I don't think of any sentence as a "one-liner", but I do pay attention to how people actually speak when they are being funny. Rhythm is key.

I wondered about the half-life of regret.

Plots are for dead people.

The affectionate farce I make of him ignores the ways I feel his lack of love for me. But we are managing.

It is like having a book out from the library. It is like constantly having a book out from the library.

We were in dialogue that was about something other than what we were saying.

I love plays. Even bad ones. I like the fact that actual live, breathing people are standing before you in tense situations that you are not personally responsible for.

Personally I've never put much store by honesty- I mean how can you trust a word whose first letter you don't even pronounce

Adults are living increasingly as children: completely in their imaginations. Reading Harry Potter while every newspaper in the country goes out of business. They know so little that is real.

A novel is a daily labor over a period of years. A novel is a job. But a story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.

Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.

An agony. The exit like the entrance - but reserved. A palindrome: gut-tug.

People will do anything, anything, for a really nice laugh.

If God Speaks Through Burning Bushes, Let's Burn Bush and Listen to What God Says.

Twenty-year-olds have a kind of emotional idealism about relationships and about the world that enables them to say, 'No, you lied to me. Goodbye.' When they see wickedness, they walk away.

One should never turn one's back on a vivid imagination.

You know, I'm just a very boring, not very funny person in person. I don't feel pressured to be otherwise.