Top 200 Lorrie Moore Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Divorce, she could see, would be like marriage – a power grab, as in who would be the dog, and who would be the owner of the dog.”

— Lorrie Moore

52. “The speech she made was done in the back, alone, like little shoes cobbled by an elf: spider is to web as weaver is to blank. That one was hers. She was proud of that. Also, blank is to heartache as forest is to bench.”

— Lorrie Moore

53. “You are unhappy because you believe in such a thing as happy.”

— Lorrie Moore

54. “I felt nothing like a horse, whose instincts I knew were to run and run. I had mostly in life tried to stand still like a glob of coral so as not to be spotted by sharks. But now I had crawled out onto land and was somehow already a horse.”

— Lorrie Moore

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

— Lorrie Moore

56. “It was like the classic scene in the movies where one lover is on the train and one is on the platform and the train starts to pull away, and the lover on the platform begins to trot along and then jog and then sprint and then gives up altogether as the train speeds irrevocably off. Except in this case I was all the parts: I was the lover on the platform, I was the lover on the train. And I was also the train.”

— Lorrie Moore

57. “A woman had to choose her own particular unhappiness carefully. That was the only happiness in life: to choose the best unhappiness. An unwise move, good God, you could squander everything.”

— Lorrie Moore

58. “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

59. “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.”

— Lorrie Moore

60. “A smile, a weird one, nestled in his mouth like an egg.”

— Lorrie Moore

61. “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

62. “When they slept together, she almost cried. He was a kisser, and he kissed and kissed. It seemed the kindest thing that had ever happened to her. He kissed and whispered and brought her a large glass of water when she asked for one.”

— Lorrie Moore

63. “Begin to wonder what you do write about. Or if you have anything to say. Or even if there is such a thing as a thing to say. Limit these thoughts to no more than ten minutes a day; like sit-ups, they can make you thin.”

— Lorrie Moore

64. “You have a choice,” she told the class. “The whorish emptiness of lies or the straightlaced horrors of truth.”

— Lorrie Moore

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

— Lorrie Moore

66. “The later-afternoon air of our exhalations hung in brief clouds before us. The thought balloon of my own breath said, “How have I found myself here?” It was not a theological question. It was one of transportation and neurology.”

— Lorrie Moore

67. “He had never been involved with the mentally ill before, but he now felt more than ever that there should be strong international laws against them being too good-looking.”

— Lorrie Moore

68. “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.”

— Lorrie Moore

69. “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.”

— Lorrie Moore

70. “I don’t care if I’m a fish, I still want a bicycle.”

— Lorrie Moore

71. “For driving, a January thaw was always preferable to actual ice, but when it was over things froze more treacherously than before. And in its melting and condensing the roadside snow turned to clumps reminiscent of black-spotted cauliflower. Better never to have thawed.”

— Lorrie Moore

72. “Later on in life you will learn that writers are merely open, helpless texts with no real understanding of what they have written and therefore must half-believe anything and everything that is said of them.”

— Lorrie Moore

73. “I’ve accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change.”

— Lorrie Moore

74. “We curl up on the couch together, under a blanket, whisper I love you, I missed you, confusing tenses I think.”

— Lorrie Moore

75. “She was afraid, and the afraid, she realized, sought opportunities for bravery in love.”

— Lorrie Moore

76. “The only happiness you have is writing something new, in the middle of the night, armpits damp, heart pounding, something no one has yet seen. You have only those brief, fragile, untested moments of exhilaration when you know: you are a genius.”

— Lorrie Moore

77. “I don’t think of any sentence as a “one-liner”, but I do pay attention to how people actually speak when they are being funny. Rhythm is key.”

— Lorrie Moore

78. “Life is sad, I thought. Here is someone.”

— Lorrie Moore

79. “A match made in heaven – where do you get those? That’s what I want to know!”

— Lorrie Moore

80. “Editing is just ongoing. I don’t count drafts, or know what would fully constitute a draft. But I try to fix as I go. And there’s always more to fix.”

— Lorrie Moore

81. “What I really felt was this: chopped down like a tree, a new feeling, and I was realizing that all new feelings from here on in would probably be bad ones. Surprises would no longer be good. And feelings might take on actual physical form, like those sad fish lips, a mouth speared into a gasping silence, or worse.”

— Lorrie Moore

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

— Lorrie Moore

83. “If dolphins tasted good,” he said, “we wouldn’t even know about their language.”

— Lorrie Moore

84. “Do not resent her. Think about the situation, for instance, when you take the last trash bag from its box: you must throw out the box by putting it in that very trash bag. What was once contained, now must contain. The container, then, becomes the contained, the enveloped, the held.”

— Lorrie Moore

85. “This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.”

— Lorrie Moore

86. “I had never feared insomnia before – like prison, wouldn’t it just give you more time to read?”

— Lorrie Moore

87. “They looked like frogs who’d been kissed and kissed roughly, yet stayed frogs.”

— Lorrie Moore

88. “Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.”

— Lorrie Moore

89. “I’m going to marry you till you puke.”

— Lorrie Moore

90. “Like true friends, they take no hardy or elegant stance loosely choreographed from some broad perspective. They get right in there and mutter “Jesus Christ!” and shake their heads.”

— Lorrie Moore

91. “Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.”

— Lorrie Moore

92. “This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she’d noticed a lot in people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. But they recycled their newspapers!”

— Lorrie Moore

93. “Most things good for writing are bad for life.”

— Lorrie Moore

94. “The proper relationship of a writer to his or her own life is similar to a cook with a cupboard. What the cook takes from the cupboard is not the same thing as what is in the cupboard.”

— Lorrie Moore

95. “From Charades: when she was younger she was a frustrated mother, so she is pleased when her children act as is they don’t remember.”

— Lorrie Moore

96. “If prose can cast a spell, we will listen to it no matter what it’s saying. If a narrative uses language in a magical and enlivening way, we will listen to the story. But if the language doesn’t cast a spell, we will listen to it only if it is telling us something that actually happened.”

— Lorrie Moore

97. “I was too fresh from childhood. Subconsciously, my deepest brain still a cupboard of fairy tales, I suppose I believed that if pretty woman was no longer pretty she had done something to deserve it. I had a young girl’s belief that this kind of negative aging would never come to me. Death would come to me – I knew this from reading British poetry. But the drying, hunching, blanching, hobbling, fading, fattening, thinning, slowing? I would just not let that happen to moi.”

— Lorrie Moore

98. “In general, people were not road maps. People were not hieroglyphs or books. They were not stories. A person was a collection of accidents. A person was an infinite pile of rocks with things growing underneath.”

— Lorrie Moore

99. “Visit a place at night, she knew, and it was yours.”

— Lorrie Moore

100. “The catalog showed a man sleeping peacefully while his model-wife read a book in soft but focused light. In real life, however, the light was so intense that the same man would have had to wear sunglasses.”

— Lorrie Moore