Top 200 Lorrie Moore Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

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

— Lorrie Moore

3. “Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.”

— Lorrie Moore

4. “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.”

— Lorrie Moore

5. “I always had the sense with her that she didn’t suffer fools gladly but that life was taking great pains to show her how.”

— Lorrie Moore

6. “If you’re suicidal, and you don’t actually kill yourself, you become known as ’wry.”

— Lorrie Moore

7. “When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet.”

— Lorrie Moore

8. “I missed him. Love, I realized, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that.”

— Lorrie Moore

9. “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

10. “Plots are for dead people.”

— Lorrie Moore

11. “If God Speaks Through Burning Bushes, Let’s Burn Bush and Listen to What God Says.”

— Lorrie Moore

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

— Lorrie Moore

13. “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.”

— Lorrie Moore

14. “This was my modest dream come true: unambitious flight. The kind that never even got high enough for a view.”

— Lorrie Moore

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

— Lorrie Moore

16. “Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether.”

— Lorrie Moore

17. “A story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.”

— Lorrie Moore

18. “Everyone at some point in their lives should have a long great love affair with a magnificent lunatic.”

— Lorrie Moore

19. “There seemed nothing so true as a yellow tree.”

— Lorrie Moore

20. “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

21. “But family life sometimes had a vortex, like weather. It could be like a tornado in a quiet zigzag: get close enough and you might see within it a spinning eighteen-wheeler and a woman.”

— Lorrie Moore

22. “What do I do when writing isn’t going well? Well, I don’t write – which is symptom, cure, and cause. And then sometimes I just tell myself, as I’m writing, “I’ll fix it later.” And sometimes it’s true, I do.”

— Lorrie Moore

23. “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.”

— Lorrie Moore

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

— Lorrie Moore

25. “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

26. “The ants are my friends- they’re blowing in the wind.”

— Lorrie Moore

27. “From here on in, many things can happen. But the main one will be this: you decide not to go to law school after all, and, instead, you spend a good, big chunk of your adult life telling people how you decided not to go to law school after all. Somehow you end up writing again.”

— Lorrie Moore

28. “I always do the wrong. I do the wrong thing so much that the times I actually do the right thing stand out so brightly in my memory that I forget I always do the wrong thing.”

— Lorrie Moore

29. “Things between us were dissolving like an ice cub in a glass: the smaller it got, the faster it disappeared.”

— Lorrie Moore

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

— Lorrie Moore

31. “Love is a fever,” she said. “And when you come out of it you’ll discover whether you’ve been lucky – or not.”

— Lorrie Moore

32. “Don’t make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time.”

— Lorrie Moore

33. “This ceremony of approval was a charade – everything had been decided before we got here – and as with all charades it was wanly ebullient, necessary, and thin.”

— Lorrie Moore

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

— Lorrie Moore

35. “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!”

— Lorrie Moore

36. “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.”

— Lorrie Moore

37. “Nothing’s a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.”

— Lorrie Moore

38. “A DARK MATTER is a page-turning thriller of every sort: psychological, sociological, epistemological. Plus, it’s really scary.”

— Lorrie Moore

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

— Lorrie Moore

40. “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

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

— Lorrie Moore

42. “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.”

— Lorrie Moore

43. “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.”

— Lorrie Moore

44. “What is beautiful is seized,” my mother said a final time, speaking of my father, whom she said had been destroyed by too many women, a heart picked over, scratched at, taken, lost. “It came to me in bulky bandages, seeming much larger, much more than it really was.”

— Lorrie Moore

45. “Those are the love killers. They love you and then they kill you. They’re from another planet. Supposedly.”

— Lorrie Moore

46. “I count too heavily on birthdays, though I know I shouldn’t. Inevitably I begin to assess my life by them, figure out how I’m doing by how many people remember; it’s like the old fantasy of attending your own funeral: You get to see who your friends are, get to see who shows up.”

— Lorrie Moore

47. “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!’”

— Lorrie Moore

48. “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

49. “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

50. “I wondered about the half-life of regret.”

— Lorrie Moore