395 Quotes by Lorrie Moore

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.

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

The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, ‘Write something you’d never show your mother or father. And you know what they say? I could never do that!’

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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