Quotes from Lorrie Moore

Sometimes there was a simultaneous quiet upstairs and down, like a blanket of snow, as if at that moment no one anywhere in the galaxy knew what to say.

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.

That was also back in the days when I thought the ice-cream man lived in his truck

At work you will be lachrymose and distracted. You will shuffle through the hall like a legume with feet. People will notice.

There are six more paragraphs. You read the whole thing out loud in class. No one likes it. They say your sense of plot is outrageous and incompetent. After class someone asks you if you are crazy.

Why not admit history's power to divide and destroy? Why attach ourselves to the age-old stories in the belief that they are truer than the new ones? By living in the past, you always know what comes next, and that robs you of surprises. It exhausts and warps the mind. We are lucky simply to be alive together; why get differentiating and judgmental about who is here among us? Thank God there is anyone at all.

Jane gave Heffie an anxious look. It said Please forgive me. It also said What is your problem? and Have a nice day Pleasantness was the machismo of the Midwest. There was something athletic about it. You flexed your face into a smile and let it hover there like the dare of a cat

The piece was like an elegant interrogation made of tangled yarn, a query from a well-dressed man in a casket, not yet dead. It proceeded slowly, like a careful equation, and then not: if x = y, if major = minor, if death equals part of life and life part of death, then what is the sum of the infinite notes of this one phrase? It asked, answered, reasked, its moody asking a refinement of reluctance or dislike.

These were the sorts of notions that had been raised in all my classes, and we had chased them round and round like dogs maddened by their tails.

She decided it was perhaps a little like marriage itself: a good idea that, like all ideas, lived awkwardly on earth. -Terrific Mother

To know something you had to be able to go inside and feel, then step outside and look, and then do that again: go inside, feel, then outside and look. You had to do it twice. That was knowledge. Two in a row.

It's two against one out here; we just keep taking turns.

baseball is really the game that tells you what life is going to be: fastballs, errors, wild pitching, clutch hits, strike-outs, not getting to first base, things coming in from left field. Near misses. And that's just the romance part.

Learn that you have a way of knowing each other which somehow slips out and beyond the ways you have of not knowing each other at all.

All of life seems to me a strange dream about losing things you never had to begin with. About trying to find your glasses when you can't see because you don't have your glasses on.

Everyone at some point in their lives should have a long great love affair with a magnificent lunatic.

I cannot see life, what it's supposed to be: I'm stumped and mystified and frozen in place. Yet other times, I realize, regardless, there's a lot to be thankful for. It's perplexing! How's a soul to know?

What is beautiful is seized, my mother said a final time, speaking of my father, whom she said had been destroyed by too many women, a heart picked over, scratched at, taken, lost. It came to me in bulky bandages, seeming much larger, much more than it really was.

Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain, hope played like a playing card upon another hope, a wish for kindness and mercies to emerge like kings and queens in an unexpected change of the game. One could hold the cards oneself or not: they would land the same regardless.

I once murdered someone and American Express covered everything.

She recognized the panic at even a moment's boredom that all these piles contained, as well as the unreasonable hopefulness regarding time.

One of the problems with people in Chicago, she remembered, was that they were never lonely at the same time. Their sadness occurred in isolation, lurched and spazzed, sent them spinning fizzly back into empty, padded corners, disconnected and alone.

If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You didn't have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell off the bike: I was drinking my wine too quickly.

This ceremony of approval was a charade - everything had been decided before we got here - and as with all charades it was wanly ebullient, necessary, and thin.