Lorrie Moore Quotes - Page 6

There seemed nothing so true as a yellow tree.

After a childhood of hungering to be an adult, my hunger had passed. Unexpected fates had begun to catch my notice. These middle-aged women seemed very tired to me, as if hope had been wrung out of them and replaced with a deathly, walking sort of sleep.

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

No matter that you anticipate a thing; you get so used to it as part of the future that its actuality, its arrival, its force and presence, startles you, takes you by surprise, as would a ghost suddenly appearing in the room wearing familiar perfume and boots.

I want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.

We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.

I wished for eternal and intriguing muteness. I would be the Mysterious Dumb Girl, the Enigmatic Elf. The human voice no longer interested me.

This was love, I supposed, and eventually I would come to know it. Someday it would choose me and I would come to know its spell, for long stretches and short, two times, maybe three, and then quite probably it would choose me never again.

Women now were told not to settle for second best, told that they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around.

It was part of being a girl in the '60s that you were creative.

A funny line can never exist on its own. It needs to be surrounded by mood and circumstances.

If I retain any freshness of approach, it's by going slowly having long intervals between finished projects.

I did think reviewers were supposed to be polite about story collections - collections are rather delicate creatures in the literary environment - but not everybody got this memo, I guess.