Top 200 Lorrie Moore Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “I do have people in mind when I write. I don’t know precisely who they are, however, or how many of them there are.”

— Lorrie Moore

102. “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

103. “All of life seems to me a strange dream about losing things you never had to begin with. About trying to find your glasses when you can’t see because you don’t have your glasses on.”

— Lorrie Moore

104. “Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.”

— Lorrie Moore

105. “When she got to Eileen Reilly, Eileen turned red and said, “I would rather not say.” This astounded me, for her father was a handsome, charming salesman at Home Savings Shoes on Main Street – Stan the Shoe Man, my mother affectionately called him. But his daughter had absorbed some disappointment – his, or her mother’s – and did not want to speak of how he earned his living. Perhaps that was the moment I learned this as a source of personal shame, or observed the possibility of it.”

— Lorrie Moore

106. “So I needed to be womanised. I was losing my sheen.”

— Lorrie Moore

107. “She would try to live life one day at a time, like an alcoholic – drink, don’t drink, drink. Perhaps she should take drugs.”

— Lorrie Moore

108. “I had one elegantly folded cookie – a short paper nerve baked in an ear.”

— Lorrie Moore

109. “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

110. “He calls you occasionally at the office to ask how you are. You doodle numbers and curlicues on the corners of Rolodex cards. Fiddle with your Phi Beta Kappa key. Stare out the window. You always, always, say: “Fine.”

— Lorrie Moore

111. “Tell him not to smoke in your apartment. Tell him to get out. At first he protests. But slowly, slowly, he leaves, pulling up the collar on his expensive beige raincoat, like an old and haggard Robert Culp. Slam the door like Bette Davis. Love drains from 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

112. “Through all the muck of themselves, the times they had unobligated each other, the anger, the permitted absences, the loneliness grown dangerous, she had always returned to him. He’d had faith in that – abracadabra! But eventually the deadlines set in again. Could you live in the dead excellence of a thing – the stupid mortar of a body, the stubborn husk love had crawled from? Yes, he thought.”

— Lorrie Moore

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

— Lorrie Moore

114. “But there was in the air that kind of distortion that bent you a little; it caused your usual self to grow slippery, to wander off and shop, to get blurry, bleed, bevel with possibility.”

— Lorrie Moore

115. “Losing confidence was more violent than losing love. Losing love was a slow dying, but losing confidence was a quick coup, a floor that opened right up and swallowed.”

— Lorrie Moore

116. “He began to prefer talking on the phone to actually getting together with someone, preferred the bodilessness of it, and started to turn down social engagements. He didn’t want to actually sit across from someone in a restaurant, look at their face, and eat food. He wanted to turn away, not deal with the face, have the waitress bring them two tin cans and some string so they could just converse, in a faceless dialogue.”

— Lorrie Moore

117. “Unfortunately, you have lost the respect of all but one of your co-workers and many of your superiors as well, who are working in order to send their daughters to universities so they won’t have to be secretaries, and who, therefore, hold you in contempt for having a degree and being a failure anyway. It is like having a degree in failure.”

— Lorrie Moore

118. “I tried to live cautiously – or eventually learned to try to live – in a spirit of regret prevention, and I could not see how Bonnie could accomplish such a thing in this situation. Regret – operatic, oceanic, fathomless – seemed to stretch before her in every direction. No matter which path she took, regret would stain her feet and scratch her arms and rain down on her, lightlessly and lifelong. It had already begun.”

— Lorrie Moore

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

— Lorrie Moore

120. “I had seen this exact same expression and movement before – where? In the future I would come to know that look as the beginning of the end of love – the death of a man’s trying. It read as Haughty Fatigue. Like the name of a stripper.”

— Lorrie Moore

121. “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.”

— Lorrie Moore

122. “It was part of being a girl in the ’60s that you were creative.”

— Lorrie Moore

123. “At home in Dellacrosse my place in the world of college and Troy and incipient adulthood dissolved and I became an unseemly collection of jostling former selves. Snarkiness streaked through my voice, or sullenness drove me behind a closed door for hours at a time.”

— Lorrie Moore

124. “You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can’t pay our bills.”

— Lorrie Moore

125. “She knew there were only small joys in life – the big ones were too complicated to be joys when you got all through – and once you realized that, it took a lot of the pressure off.”

— Lorrie Moore

126. “I would look out upon the wildflowers, the mulch of swamps and leaves, the spring mosses greening on the rocks, or the boulderous mountains of street-black snow, whatever season it happened to be- my mittens clotted with ice, or my hands grimy with marsh mud- and from the back of my larynx I’d send part of my voice out toward the horizon and part of it straight up toward the sky. There must have been some pain in me. I wanted to howl and fly and break apart.”

— Lorrie Moore

127. “So much urgent and lifelike love went rumbling around underground and died there, never got expressed at all, so let some errant inconvenient attraction have its way. There was so little time.”

— Lorrie Moore

128. “Awkwardness is where tension is, and tension is where the story is. It’s also where the comedy is, which I’m interested in; when it resolves it tends to resolve toward melancholy, a certain resignation, which I find interesting as well.”

— Lorrie Moore

129. “I realized that life was too short for anyone honestly and thoroughly to outgrow anything, but it was clear that some people were making more of an effort than others.”

— Lorrie Moore

130. “Perhaps she drives men away. Perhaps, without even being able to help herself, she just puts men into her ill-tempered car and drives them off: to quarries, dumps, small anonymous bodies of water.”

— Lorrie Moore

131. “As the most recently arrived to earthly life, children can seem in lingering possession of some heavenly lidless eye.”

— Lorrie Moore

132. “Better to think of writing, of what one does, as an activity, rather than an identity to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun.”

— Lorrie Moore

133. “I want to pretend there’s such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.”

— Lorrie Moore

134. “They looked at her quizzically, came at her with assumptions, presumptions, what they believed was intimate knowledge of her. She felt unarmed, by comparison; disadvantaged.”

— Lorrie Moore

135. “Pleasantness was the machismo of the Midwest. There was something athletic about it. You flexed your face into a smile and let it hover there like the dare of a cat.”

— Lorrie Moore

136. “You couldn’t pretend you had lost nothing... you had to begin there, not let your blood freeze over. If your heart turned away at this, it would turn away at something greater, then more and more until your heart stayed averted, immobile, your imagination redistributed away from the world and back only toward the bad maps of yourself, the sour pools of your own pulse, your own tiny, mean, and pointless wants.”

— Lorrie Moore

137. “That was also back in the days when I thought the ice-cream man lived in his truck.”

— Lorrie Moore

138. “You reach a point,” she wrote me once, “where you cannot cry anymore, and you look around you at people you know, at people your own age, and they’re not crying either. Something has been taken. And they are emptier. And they are grateful.”

— Lorrie Moore

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

— Lorrie Moore

140. “Oh, the beautiful smiles of the insane. Soon, he was sure, there would be a study that showed that the mentally ill were actually more attractive than other people. Dating proved it!”

— Lorrie Moore

141. “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.”

— Lorrie Moore

142. “You always say that,” said Evan, “but then you go on your trips and vacations and then you settle back into things and then you’re quiet for a while and then you say you’re fine, you’re busy, and then after a while you say you’re going crazy again, and you start all over.”

— Lorrie Moore

143. “Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.”

— Lorrie Moore

144. “I love plays. Even bad ones. I like the fact that actual live, breathing people are standing before you in tense situations that you are not personally responsible for.”

— Lorrie Moore

145. “I guessed that only at the last possible minute did the soul in a determined fashion flee the dying flesh. Who could blame it for its reluctance? We loved our lives more than we ever knew, and at the end felt the bounty of them, as one would say in church, felt even the richness of their missed opportunities, or just understood that they were more than we had realized during the living of them and a lot to give up.”

— Lorrie Moore

146. “Philosophers are good at parties but not for cleaning up after.”

— Lorrie Moore

147. “Also, he had the kind of mustache a college roommate of hers used to say looked like it had crawled up to find a warm spot to die.”

— Lorrie Moore

148. “I feared Sarah was one of those women who instead of laughing said, “That’s funny,” or instead of smiling said, “That’s interesting,” or instead of saying, “You are a stupid blithering idiot,” said, “Well I think it’s a little more complicated than that.”

— Lorrie Moore

149. “Although Kit and Rafe had met in the peace movement, marching, organizing, making no nukes signs, now they wanted to kill each other. They had become, also, a little pro-nuke.”

— Lorrie Moore

150. “At times like these, she thought, it was probably a good idea to carry a small hand puppet.”

— Lorrie Moore