Lorrie Moore

Writer

1957-01-13

Quotes by Lorrie Moore

• But it would be like going to Heaven and not finding any of your friends there. Her life would go all beatific and empty in the eyes.

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• Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain, hope played like a playing card upon another hope, a wish for kindness and mercies to emerge like kings and queens in an unexpected change of the game. One could hold the cards oneself or not: they would land the same regardless.

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• It was true. Men could be with whomever they pleased. But women had to date better, kinder, richer, and bright, bright, bright, or else people got embarrassed.

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• Through college she had been a feminist— basically: she shaved her legs, but just not often enough, she liked to say.

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• Later I would come to believe that erotic ties were all a spell, a temporary psychosis, even a kind of violence, or at least they coexisted with these states. I noted that criminals as well as the insane tended to give off a palpable, vibrating allure, a kind of animal magnetism that kept them loved by someone. How else could they survive at all? Someone had to hide them from the authorities! Hence the necessity and prevalence of sex appeal for people who were wild and on the edge.

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• Tell me something wonderful, he said to Dane. Tell me that we are going to die dreamfully and loved in our sleep.You're always writing one of your plays on the phone, said Dane.I said, something wonderful. Say something about springtime.It is sloppy and wet. It is a beast from the sea.Ah, said Harry.

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• 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.

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• Marriage, she felt, was a fine arrangement generally, except that one never got it generally. One got it very, very specifically.

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• 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.

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• Abby began to think that all the beauty and ugliness and turbulence one found scattered through nature, one could also find in people themselves, all collected there, all together in a single place. No matter what terror or loveliness the earth could produce- wind, 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.

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• The night before, a whole day could have shape and design. But when it was upon you, it could vanish tragically to air.

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• 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.

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• The turkeys I eat are raised on farms. They're different. They've signed on the dotted line.

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• So I needed to be womanised. I was losing my sheen.

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• She wore a lot of gray-green corduroy. She had been under the impression that it brought out her eyes, those shy stars.

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• Back at home, days later, feel cranky and tired. Sit on the couch and tell him he's stupid. That you bet he doesn't know who Coriolanus is. That since you moved in you've noticed he rarely reads. He will give you a hurt, hungry-to-learn look, with his James Cagney eyes. He will try to kiss you. Turn your head. Feel suffocated. (from How)

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• He will talk about what some other people said, and what he and some other people did, and when he never specifically mentions women it will be like the Soviet news agency which never publicizes anything containing the names of the towns where the new bombs are.

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• Where does love go? When something you have taped on the wall falls off, what has happened to the stickum? It has relaxed. It has accumulated an assortment of hairs and fuzzies. It has said Fuck it and given up. It doesn't go anywhere special, it's just gone. Energy is created, and then it is destroyed. So much for the laws of physics. So much for chemistry. So much for not so much.

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• Decide that you like college life. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life.

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

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