Quotes from Lorrie Moore

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.

At times like these, she thought, it was probably a good idea to carry a small hand puppet.

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.

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.

What was education for, if not to acquire contradictions? At least it looked like that to me.

The trick to flying safely, Zoe always said, was to never buy a discount ticket and to tell yourself you had nothing to live for anyway, so that when the plane crashed it was no big deal. Then, when it didn't crash, when you had succeeded in keeping it aloft with your own worthlessness, all you had to do was stagger off, locate your luggage, and, by the time a cab arrived, come up with a persuasive reason to go on living.

In so many things I loved I was sadly insufficiently gifted and driven. But writing I could plod along with -- and no one discouraged me. People were much kinder. I headed toward the kindness.

When I go back to the places of the past, nothing is there anymore, as if I have made the whole thing up. It is as if life were just a dream placed in the window to cool, like a pie, then stolen.

Adoption. A realized fantasy of your parents not really being your parents. Your genes could thrust one arm in the air and pump up and down. Yes! You were not actually related to Them!

I was already becoming a woman who sized up another one fast—I was becoming typical.

When misfortune accumulated, I could feel now, it strafed you to the thinness of a nightgown, sheared you to the sheerness of a slip.

The night before, a whole day could have shape and design. But when it was upon you, it could vanish tragically to air.

You always say that, said Evan, but then you go on your trips and vacations and then you settle back into things and then you're quiet for a while and then you say you're fine, you're busy, and then after a while you say you're going crazy again, and you start all over.

Irrigation sprinklers like the skeletons of brontosauruses. -Tassie Keltjin

Unfortunately, you have lost the respect of all but one of your co-workers and many of your superiors as well, who are working in order to send their daughters to universities so they won't have to be secretaries, and who, therefore, hold you in contempt for having a degree and being a failure anyway. It is like having a degree in failure.

I didn't want to, even in my imagination, even for a second, to conflate this sophisticated woman with my mother, a woman so frugal and clueless that she had once given me - to have! to know! to wear! - her stretch black lace underwear that had shrunk in the dryer, though I was only ten.

You were never to say you weren't fine, thank you — and yourself? You were supposed to be Heidi. You were supposed to lug goat milk up the hills and not think twice. Heidi did not complain. Heidi did not do things like stand in front of the new IBM photocopier saying, If this fucking Xerox machine breaks on me one more time, I'm going to slit my wrists.

Imagine a wife and a mistress sharing the same toothbrush forever and ever, never knowing.

But I traffic a little in 'conspiracy theories' as we used to understand them, ones that put groups and systems back into the situations where individuals were taking the rap.

Are you anywhere near Champaign-Urbana? No. I went there once. I thought from its name that it would be a different kind of place. I kept saying to myself, 'Champagne, urbah na, champagne, urbah na! Champagne! Urbana' He sighed. It was just this thing in the middle of a field.

Amber was not shy. If she had been shy, not one of us would be at Perkins right now.

Then, when it didn't crash, when you succeeded in keeping it aloft with your own worthlessness, all you had to do was stagger off, locate your luggage, and, by the time a cab arrived, come up with a persuasive reason to go on living.

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!

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.