Quotes from Lorrie Moore

There are lots of people in this world, Moss, but you can't be in love with them all.

Someday, like everybody, this man you truly love like no other is going to die. No matter how much you love him, you cannot save him. No matter how much you love: nothing, no one, lasts.

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

As a feminist you mustn't blame the other woman," a neighbor told her. "As a feminist I request that you no longer speak to me," Kit replied.)

Also, he had the kind of mustache a college roommate of hers used to say looked like it had crawled up to find a warm spot to die.

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.

Una vida así requería una autoestima exagerada. Suponía tener cantidades excesivas de esperanza y desesperación, y ponerlas al tuntún, como países tercermundistas del continente de las emociones.

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.

If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry.

There was the usual dreaminess, I suppose. Also a shyness that caused me—and others—to notice that I could express myself better by writing than by speaking. This is typical of many writers, I think. What is a drawback in childhood is an asset to a literary life. Not being fluent on one's feet sends one to the page and a habit is born.

The only happiness you have is writing something new, in the middle of the night, armpits damp, heart pounding, something no one has yet seen. You have only those brief, fragile, untested moments of exhilaration when you know: you are a genius.

I feel his lack of love for me.

It broke her heart that they had come to this: if one knew the future, all the unexpected glimpses of the beloved, one might have trouble finding the courage to go on. This was probably the reason nine-tenths of the human brain had been rendered useless: to make you stupidly intrepid. One was working with only the animal brain, the Pringle brain. The wizard-god brain, the one that could see the future and move objects without touching them, was asleep. Fucking bastard.

He began to prefer talking on the phone to actually getting together with someone, preferred the bodilessness of it, and started to turn down social engagements. He didn't want to actually sit across from someone in a restaurant, look at their face, and eat food. He wanted to turn away, not deal with the face, have the waitress bring them two tin cans and some string so they could just converse, in a faceless dialogue.

Tell me something wonderful, he said to Dane. Tell me that we are going to die dreamfully and loved in our sleep. You're always writing one of your plays on the phone, said Dane. I said, something wonderful. Say something about springtime. It is sloppy and wet. It is a beast from the sea. Ah, said Harry.

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.

And all love that had overtaken her would have to be a memory, a truck on the interstate roaring up from the left, a thing she must let pass.

But it would be like going to Heaven and not finding any of your friends there. Her life would go all beatific and empty in the eyes.

Love drains from you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight. You are like a house slowly losing its electricity, the fans slowing, the lights dimming and flickering; the clocks stop and go and stop.

If dolphins tasted good," he said, "we wouldn't even know about their language.

He had never been involved with the mentally ill before, but he now felt more than ever that there should be strong international laws against them being too good-looking.

She believes you can refuse to participate in certain emotions. "I like hamburgers but I don't eat them," she says. "Hamburgers are not an emotion," says Roz. "Yes they are," says Charis.

Life is sad, I thought. Here is someone.

Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain...