395 Quotes by Lorrie Moore

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.

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.

They were in performance. They were performing their marriage at me.

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

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

Irrigation sprinklers like the skeletons of brontosauruses. -Tassie Keltjin.

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.

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.

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.