395 Quotes by Lorrie Moore

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.

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.

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.

Get a Job, she shouted silently to God. Get a real Job.

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.

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

Someday, like everybody, this man you truly love like no other is going to die. No matter how much you love him, you cannot save him. No matter how much you love: nothing, no one, lasts.

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

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