395 Quotes by Lorrie Moore

though what bird in the best of circumstances does not look a little stricken?

She hated money! though she knew it was like blood and you needed it. Still, it was also like blood in that she often couldn't stand the sight of it.

I'm bonkers, aren't I? I ask with my mouth full. You're unhappy, says Mr. Fernandez. It can be the same thing. You are unhappy because you believe in such a thing as happy.

I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it.

One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

All this wandering that you do," he said, leaning in the window, his face white as a cream cheese, his scar the carved zigzag of a snowmobile across a winter lake. Wind blew handsomely through his hair. "How will anyone ever get close to you?""I don't know," she said. She shook his hand through the window and then put on her gloves.

Divorce, she could see, would be like marriage - a power grab, as in who would be the dog, and who would be the owner of the dog.

I looked in vain for LaRoue, my cruelty towards her now in me like a splinter, where it would sit for years in my helpless memory, the skin growing around; what else can memory do? It can do nothing: It pretends to eat the shrapnel of your acts, yet it cannot swallow or chew.

Observing others go through them, he used to admire midlife crises, the courage and shamelessness and existential daring of them, but after he'd watched his own wife, a respectable nursery school teacher, produce and star in a full-blown one of her own, he found the sufferers of such crises not only self-indulgent but greedy and demented, and he wished them all weird unnatural deaths with various contraptions easily found in garages.