Quotes from Lorrie Moore

Years later, when they were killed in a car crash on the Farm to Market Road, and the Nell-that-never-lived died with them, Olena, numbly rearranging the letters of her own name on the envelopes of the sympathy cards she received, discovered what the letters spelled: Olena; Alone.

She liked her pieces to have something from every time of day in them — she didn't trust things written in the morning only — so she reread and rewrote painstakingly. No part of a day — its moods, its light — was allowed to dominate. She hung on to a piece for a year sometimes, revising at all hours, until the entirety of a day had registered there.

Convinced, as Ruth was, despite the one lung, the lip blisters, and the kelodial track across her ribs, that at the end she would regret the cigarettes she hadn't smoked more than the ones she had.

If I could not be anchored and profound, I would try, at least, to be kind.

She wore a lot of gray-green corduroy. She had been under the impression that it brought out her eyes, those shy stars.

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, to sour pools of your own pulse, your own tiny, mean, and pointless wants.

Think: What has happened to me? Why am I lying like this on top of my covers with too much Jontue and mascara and jewelry, pretending casually that this is how I always go to bed, while a pervert with six new steak knives is about to sneak through my unlocked door. Remember: at Blakely Falls High, Willis Holmes would have done anything to be with you. You don't have to put up with this: you were second runner-up at the Junior Prom.

She kept wandering in and out of the rooms, wondering where she had put things. She went downstairs into the basement for no reason at all except that it amused her to own a basement. It also amused her to own a tree. Her parents, in Maryland, had been very pleased that one of their children had at last been able to afford real estate, and when she closed on the house they sent her flowers with a congratulations card.

She had bought several plain pine chests to use as love seats or boot boxes, but they came to look to her more and more like children's coffins, so she returned them.

Try to figure out what has made your life go wrong. It is like trying to figure out what is stinking up the refrigerator. It could be anything. The lid off the mayonnaise, Uncle Ron's honey wine four years in the left corner. Broccoli yellowing, flowering fast. They are all metaphors. They are all problems.

I cried for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sent out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are true, you do! There was never any containing a song like that, keeping it. It went off and out, speeding out of earshot or imagining or any reach at all, like a rocket invented in sleep.

Zoe tried to sound like an older sister.

At all the funerals for love, love had its neat trick of making you mourn it so much, it reappeared. Popped right up from the casket. Or, if it didn't reappear itself, it sent a relative of startling resemblance, a thin and charming twin, which you took home with you to fatten and cradle, nuzzle and scold.

There is something comforting, thinks Mack, in embracing someone the same size as you.

It was as if his face had washed up on his head, like a tide, and left its mark, and then some artistic boy had come along to the same beach with a little paint.

his hair was a production, of nature and art: it was as if his face had washed up on his head, like a tide, and left its mark, and then some artistic boy had come along to the same beach with a little paint.

No, I'm not Jewish, she said archly, staring him down, to teach him, to teach him this: Are you? Yes, he said. He studied her eyes. Oh, she said. Not many of us in this part of the world, so I thought I'd ask. Yes. She felt an embarrassed sense of loss, as if something that should have been hers but wasn't had been taken away, legally, by the police.

Through college she had been a feminist—basically: she shaved her legs, but just not often enough, she liked to say.

I would be a genius now," Quilty has said three times already, "if only I'd memorized Shakespeare instead of Lulu." "If only," says Mack. Mack himself would be a genius now if only he had been born a completely different person. But what could you do? He'd read in a magazine once that geniuses were born only to women over thirty; his own mother had been twenty-nine. Damn! So fucking close!

Precancer?' she had repeated quietly, for she was a quiet woman. 'Isn't that... like life?

Quilty grimaces. "I don't like what comes after 'dicker.' " "What is that?" Quilty sighs. "Dickest. I mean, really: it's not a contest!

We don't do that in New York, rasped Odette. She cleared her throat. No? Pinky smiled and put his hand on her thigh. No, it's, um, the cash machines. You just… you wait at them. Forever. Your whole life you're just always — her hand sliced the air—there.

We got hard hearts, she said with an accent that wasn't really any particular accent at all. She wasn't good at accents.

How quickly bodies came to love each other, promise themselves to each other always, without asking permission. From the mind! If only she could give up her mind, let her heart swell, inflamed, her brain stepping out for whole days, whole seasons, her work shrinking to limericks.