Quotes from Lorrie Moore

She gave him books of poetry: Wordsworth, Whitman, all the W's. When she'd ask him how he liked them, he would say, Fine. I'm on page… and then he would tell her what page he was on and how many pages he'd accomplished that day.

The turkeys I eat are raised on farms. They're different. They've signed on the dotted line.

Oh, she said. I wasn't going to ask, but then you never said anything about it, so I thought I'd ask. How about you? Not me, said Odette. She had a poem about marriage. It began, Marriage is the death you want to die, and in front of audiences she never read it with much conviction. Usually she swung her foot back and forth through the whole thing.

Bucks, doe — thank God everything boils down to money, I always say. During mating season the doe constructs a bed for herself, and then she urinates all around the outside of it. That's how she gets her mate. So that's it, murmured Odette. I was always peeing in the bed.

it would be a combination of comfort and surprise an audience might appreciate.

She knew that the world was not created to speak just to her, and yet, as with her son, sometimes things did.

She should stay here with him, unorphan him with love's unorphaning, live wise and simple in a world monstrous enough for years of whores and death, and poems of whores and death, so monstrous how could one live in it at all? One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

She would turn from him in bed, her hands under the pillow, the digital clock peeling back the old skins of numbers.

A short story is photograph. A novel is a film.

This is a Hieronymous Bosch of facts and figures and blood and graphs.

But I keep thinking love should be like a tree. You look at trees and they've got bumps and scars from tumors, infestations, what have you, but they're still growing. Despite the bumps and bruises, they're--straight.

What the fuck, babe.

I try. What can I say?" She pauses. "Is all this really happening? I keep thinking that soon it will be over—the life expectancy of a cloud is supposed to be only twelve hours—and then I realize something has occurred that can never ever be over.

In a life where there is only the bearable and the unbearable, a sigh of relief is an ecstasy.

But if all we have to do is worry," chides the Mother, "every day for a hundred years, it'll be easy. It'll be nothing. I'll take all the worry in the world, if it wards off the thing itself.

I catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror. It seems old, with too much makeup. I feel stuck, out of school, working odd jobs, like someone brooding, hat in hand in an anteroom, waiting for the future as if it were some hoop-skirted belle that must gather up its petticoats, float forward, and present itself to me.

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.

Nightmares have seasons like hurricanes.

Thoughts of leaving will move in, bivouac throughout the living room; they will have eyes like rodents and peer out at you from under the sofa, in the dark, from under the sink, luminous glass beads positioned in twos.

The passive voice could always be used to obscure blame.

She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hairbrush and told, "There you go." She'd stood there for years, blinking and befuddled, brushing the can with the brush. Still

You will forget whoever it was that said never trust a thought doesn't come while walking. But clutch at it. Apartments can shrink inward like drying ponds.

Unless you have a life of great importance, regrets are stupid, crumpled-up tickets to a circus that has already left town.

Let's make our own way,' says the Mother, 'and not in this boat.