395 Quotes by Lorrie Moore

We curl up on the couch together, under a blanket, whisper I love you, I missed you, confusing tenses I think.

So much urgent and lifelike love went rumbling around underground and died there, never got expressed at all, so let some errant inconvenient attraction have its way. There was so little time.

When she got to Eileen Reilly, Eileen turned red and said, “I would rather not say.” This astounded me, for her father was a handsome, charming salesman at Home Savings Shoes on Main Street – Stan the Shoe Man, my mother affectionately called him. But his daughter had absorbed some disappointment – his, or her mother’s – and did not want to speak of how he earned his living. Perhaps that was the moment I learned this as a source of personal shame, or observed the possibility of it.

You couldn’t pretend you had lost nothing... you had to begin there, not let your blood freeze over. If your heart turned away at this, it would turn away at something greater, then more and more until your heart stayed averted, immobile, your imagination redistributed away from the world and back only toward the bad maps of yourself, the sour pools of your own pulse, your own tiny, mean, and pointless wants.

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.

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

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

I did think reviewers were supposed to be polite about story collections – collections are rather delicate creatures in the literary environment – but not everybody got this memo, I guess.

She knew there were only small joys in life – the big ones were too complicated to be joys when you got all through – and once you realized that, it took a lot of the pressure off.