395 Quotes by Lorrie Moore

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!

For driving, a January thaw was always preferable to actual ice, but when it was over things froze more treacherously than before. And in its melting and condensing the roadside snow turned to clumps reminiscent of black-spotted cauliflower. Better never to have thawed.

Later on in life you will learn that writers are merely open, helpless texts with no real understanding of what they have written and therefore must half-believe anything and everything that is said of them.

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.

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.

Love is a fever,” she said. “And when you come out of it you’ll discover whether you’ve been lucky – or not.

Yes,” she said. “‘I Been Working on the Railroad.’There’s just two things I’m worried about with that: the grammar and the use of slave labor.

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.

Begin to wonder what you do write about. Or if you have anything to say. Or even if there is such a thing as a thing to say. Limit these thoughts to no more than ten minutes a day; like sit-ups, they can make you thin.