Top 200 Lorrie Moore Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Philosophers are good at parties but not for cleaning up after.”

— Lorrie Moore

152. “If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.”

— Lorrie Moore

153. “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

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

— Lorrie Moore

155. “At that time in my life I was never late. Only a year later would I suddenly have difficulty hanging on to any sense of time, leaving friends sitting, invariably, for a half hour here or there. Time would waft past me undetectably or absurdly – laughably when I could laugh – in quantities I was incapable of measuring or obeying. But that year, when I was twenty, I was as punctual as a priest. Were priests punctual? Cave-raised, divinely dazed, I believed them to be.”

— Lorrie Moore

156. “We were in dialogue that was about something other than what we were saying.”

— Lorrie Moore

157. “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.”

— Lorrie Moore

158. “You confuse lovers, mix up who had what scar, what car, what mother.”

— Lorrie Moore

159. “We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.”

— Lorrie Moore

160. “One should never turn one’s back on a vivid imagination.”

— Lorrie Moore

161. “She believes you can refuse to participate in certain emotions. “I like hamburgers but I don’t eat them,” she says. “Hamburgers are not an emotion,” says Roz. “Yes they are,” says Charis.”

— Lorrie Moore

162. “Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real.”

— Lorrie Moore

163. “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

164. “That I might never have an occasion to wear such a thing or that I might look like the worst sort of Republican doing so probably never occurred to her.”

— Lorrie Moore

165. “What was education for, if not to acquire contradictions? At least it looked like that to me.”

— Lorrie Moore

166. “There are six more paragraphs. You read the whole thing out loud in class. No one likes it. They say your sense of plot is outrageous and incompetent. After class someone asks you if you are crazy.”

— Lorrie Moore

167. “But I was not especially skilled at minding children for long spells; I grew bored, perhaps like my own mother. After I spent too much time playing their games, my mind grew peckish and longed to lose itself in some book I had in my backpack. I was ever hopeful of early bedtimes and long naps.”

— Lorrie Moore

168. “At work you will be lachrymose and distracted. You will shuffle through the hall like a legume with feet. People will notice.”

— Lorrie Moore

169. “Adoption. A realized fantasy of your parents not really being your parents. Your genes could thrust one arm in the air and pump up and down. Yes! You were not actually related to Them!”

— Lorrie Moore

170. “Adults are living increasingly as children: completely in their imaginations. Reading Harry Potter while every newspaper in the country goes out of business. They know so little that is real.”

— Lorrie Moore

171. “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 hairbrush and told, “There you go.” – Willing.”

— Lorrie Moore

172. “I once murdered someone and American Express covered everything.”

— Lorrie Moore

173. “She smiled at him, with longing. ‘Where do you live,’ she asked, ’and how do I get there?”

— Lorrie Moore

174. “It’s not that men fear intimacy,′ I said to Eleanor. ‘It’s that they’re hypochondriacs of intimacy: They always think they have it when they don’t. Gerard thinks we’re very close but half the time he’s talking to me like he met me forty-five minutes ago, telling me things about himself I’ve known for years, and asking me questions about myself that he should know the answers to already. Last night he asked me what my middle name was. God, I can’t talk about it.”

— Lorrie Moore

175. “Farmers aren’t rich. They have land but no money.” Actually, my father didn’t even have that much land. He had once stood on the porch and flung his arms out and said, “Someday kids, all this will be yours.” But his knuckles hit the porch supports. Even the porch wasn’t that big.”

— Lorrie Moore

176. “She had expected a pistol to seem light and natural-a seamless extension of her angry feral self.”

— Lorrie Moore

177. “No wine,” she said. “It leads to cheese.”

— Lorrie Moore

178. “She was wearing an old summer dress as a nightgown, but in the mornings it could work as a dress again, if you just tossed a cardigan over it and put on shoes. In this risky manner, she knew, insanity could encroach.”

— Lorrie Moore

179. “Like everyone he knew, he could discern the hollowness in people’s charm only when it was directed at someone other than himself.”

— Lorrie Moore

180. “I didn’t want to, even in my imagination, even for a second, to conflate this sophisticated woman with my mother, a woman so frugal and clueless that she had once given me – to have! to know! to wear! – her stretch black lace underwear that had shrunk in the dryer, though I was only ten.”

— Lorrie Moore

181. “And all love that had overtaken her would have to be a memory, a truck on the interstate roaring up from the left, a thing she must let pass.”

— Lorrie Moore

182. “I said nothing. If she wasn’t careful, everyone would rush out of her life, life out of a burning building.”

— Lorrie Moore

183. “If I retain any freshness of approach, it’s by going slowly having long intervals between finished projects.”

— Lorrie Moore

184. “Anyone who’s read all of Proust plus The Man withour Qualities is bound t be missing out on a few other titles.”

— Lorrie Moore

185. “Then, when it didn’t crash, when you succeeded in keeping it aloft with your own worthlessness, all you had to do was stagger off, locate your luggage, and, by the time a cab arrived, come up with a persuasive reason to go on living.”

— Lorrie Moore

186. “This is why a woman makes things up: Because when she dies, those lives she never got to are all going down with her. All those possibilities will just site there like a bunch of school kids with their hands raised and uncalled on – each knowing, really knowing, the answer.”

— Lorrie Moore

187. “Get a Job, she shouted silently to God. Get a real Job.”

— Lorrie Moore

188. “The thought balloon of my own breath said, How have I found myself here?”

— Lorrie Moore

189. “The problem with a beautiful woman is that she makes everyone around her feel hopelessly masculine, which if you’re already male to begin with poses no particular problem. But if you’re anyone else, your whole sexual identity gets dragged into the principal’s office: “So what’s this I hear about you prancing around, masquerading as a woman?” You are answerless. You are sitting on your hands. You are praying for your breasts to grow, your hair to perk up.”

— Lorrie Moore

190. “She hated money! though she knew it was like blood and you needed it. Still, it was also like blood in that she often couldn’t stand the sight of it.”

— Lorrie Moore

191. “This is Quilty’s audition ritual: whenever he feels it is time for it, he calls upon himself to audition for love. He has no script, no reliable sense of stage, just a faceful of his heart’s own greasepaint and a relentless need for applause.”

— Lorrie Moore

192. “It is like having a book out from the library. It is like constantly having a book out from the library.”

— Lorrie Moore

193. “The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riveted, but in separate narratives, and so our interactions seemed weird and richly meaningless, like the characters in a Tennessee Williams play, with their bursting unimportant, but spell-bindingly mad speeches.”

— Lorrie Moore

194. “All the world’s a stage we’re going through.”

— Lorrie Moore

195. “These were the sorts of notions that had been raised in all my classes, and we had chased them round and round like dogs maddened by their tails.”

— Lorrie Moore

196. “Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.”

— Lorrie Moore

197. “Her parents had gone from a couple who would be different, who would be better than anyone, who were determined to be better than most, to a couple who would be different because they were worse.”

— Lorrie Moore

198. “Everything one reads is nourishment of some sort – good food or junk food – and one assumes it all goes in and has its way with your brain cells.”

— Lorrie Moore

199. “It’s bad enough when they refer to medical science as ‘an inexact science,’ ” says the Mother. “But when they start referring to it as ‘an art,’ I get extremely nervous.”

— Lorrie Moore

200. “A lie to the faithless is merely a conversation in their language.”

— Lorrie Moore