Lorrie Moore Quotes - Page 2

I tried not to think about my life. I did not have any good solid plans for it long-term - no bad plans either, no plans at all - and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my friends (marriage, children, law school), sometimes shamed me. Other times in my mind I defended such a condition as morally and intellectually superior - my life was open and ready and free - but that did not make it less lonely.

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.

You couldn't pretend you had lost nothing... you had to begin there, not let your blood freeze over. If your heart turned away at this, it would turn away at something greater, then more and more until your heart stayed averted, immobile, your imagination redistributed away from the world and back only toward the bad maps of yourself, the sour pools of your own pulse, your own tiny, mean, and pointless wants.

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

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.

All the way out I listen to the car AM radio, bad lyrics of trailer park love, gin and tonic love, strobe light love, lost and found love, lost and found and lost love, lost and lost and lost love—some people were having no luck at all. The DJ sounds quick and smooth and after-shaved, the rest of the world a mess by comparison.

I feared Sarah was one of those women who instead of laughing said, "That's funny," or instead of smiling said, "That's interesting," or instead of saying, "You are a stupid blithering idiot," said, "Well I think it's a little more complicated than that.

Her life her life had taken on the shape of a terrible mistake. 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 hair-brush and told, "There you go." She'd stood there for years, blinking and befuddled, brushing the can with the brush.

What little reality television I've seen seems to be about economic desperation. Like the marathon dancing of the Great Depression, which should give us pause. People willing to eat flies and worms for a sum that is less than the weekly paycheck of the show's producer. I haven't seen "reality television" that is other than this kind of painful, sadistic exploitation of fit young people looking for agents.

The thing to remember about love affairs," says Simone, "is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney." ... We have raccoons sometimes in our chimney," explains Simone. And once we tried to smoke them out. We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back. Instead, they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames and running madly around until they dropped dead." Simone swallows some wine. "Love affairs are like that," she says. "They are all like that.

Make a list of all the lovers you've ever had. Warren Lasher Ed "Rubberhead" Catapano Charles Deats or Keats Alfonse Tuck it in your pocket. Leave it lying around, conspicuously. Somehow you lose it. Make "mislaid" jokes to yourself. Make another list.

The problem with a beautiful woman is that she makes everyone around her feel hopelessly masculine, which if you’re already male to begin with poses no particular problem. But if you’re anyone else, your whole sexual identity gets dragged into the principal’s office: “So what’s this I hear about you prancing around, masquerading as a woman?” You are answerless. You are sitting on your hands. You are praying for your breasts to grow, your hair to perk up.

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

That is what is wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls - we all have a bit of that - but that they insist every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or value of gesture. The emotional necessity. For them, it is all honesty before kindness, truth before art. Love is art, not truth. It's like painting scenery.

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

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

(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.

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.

An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.

Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real.

Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.

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.

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

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.

I do have people in mind when I write. I don't know precisely who they are, however, or how many of them there are.