Lorrie Moore Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“The detachment of the artist is kind of creepy. It's kind of rude, and yet really it's where art comes from. It's not the same as courage. It's closer to bad manners than to courage. [...] if you're going to be a writer, you basically have to say, 'this is just who I am […]'. There's a certain indefensibility about it. It's not about loving your community and taking care of it — you're not attached to the chamber of commerce. It's a little unsafe. You have to be willing to have only four friends, not 11.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“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.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“She was not good on the phone. She needed the face, the pattern of eyes, nose, trembling mouth... People talking were meant to look at a face, the disastrous cupcake of it, the hide-and-seek of the heart dashing across. With a phone, you said words, but you never watched them go in. You saw them off at the airport but never knew whether there was anyone there to greet them when they got off the plane.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“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.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“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...”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“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.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“Basically, I realized I was living in that awful stage of life between twenty-six to and thirty-seven known as stupidity. It's when you don't know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don't even have a philosophy about all the things you don't know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“But I believed in starting over. There was finally, I knew, only rupture and hurt and falling short between all persons, but, Shirley, the best revenge was to turn your life into a small gathering of miracles. If I could not be anchored and profound, I would try, at least, to be kind.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“I had never feared insomnia before--like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“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.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“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.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“Love drains 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 -
“(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.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“People love gossip because it's slightly removed from actuality. It's a very literary thing... You can hear a great story, and it turns out that it's largely not true. Fiction writing is like gossip. It's not malicious gossip, but it's gossip.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“To write a short story, you have to be able to stay up all night.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“I don't have a love life. I have a like life.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“It was part of being a girl in the '60s that you were creative.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“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.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“No matter what terror 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. There was nothing as complex in the world - no flower or stone - as a single hello from a human being.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“You are unhappy because you believe in such a thing as happy.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“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.”
-- Lorrie Moore -
“I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it.”
-- Lorrie Moore
