Quotes from Lorrie Moore

I steal back into dreams of you, your unmade bed a huge open-faced sandwich.

We are dealing, she continues, with a mind, as Williams put it, like a bed all made up.

Even his I love you's, she said, were like tiny daggers, like little needles or safety pins. Beware of a man who says he loves you but is incapable of a passionate confession; of melting into a sob.

The speech she made was done in the back, alone, like little shoes cobbled by an elf: spider is to web as weaver is to blank. That one was hers. She was proud of that. Also, blank is to heartache as forest is to bench. But

The DJ sounds quick and smooth and after-shaved, the rest of the world a mess by comparison.

I am something incorrect: a hair in the cottage cheese. Something uncouth: a fart in the elevator.

He will talk about what some other people said, and what he and some other people did, and when he never specifically mentions women it will be like the Soviet news agency which never publicizes anything containing the names of the towns where the new bombs are.

One of the problems with people in Chicago, she remembered, was that they were never lonely at the same time.

You are too gifted a person to be living in a state that borders on North Dakota.

Talent. I don't have talent. I have willingness.

She thought about Ariel again, how much the girl's approval has come to mean to her, and wondered how one's children got so powerful that way.

I nodded, trying to imagine the very particular sadness of a vanished childhood yogurt now found only in France. It was a very special sort of sadness, individual, and in its inability to induce sympathy, in its tuneless spark, it bypassed poetry and entered science.

Life was long enough so that you can keep relearning things. Think and feel and realize again what you used to know.

On Fridays there were fish fries or boils at which they served "lawyers" (burbot or eelpout), so-called because their hearts were in their butts.

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.

His fish smells fishier than the others- he is sure of it. Perhaps he has been poisoned.

Despite all my curatorial impulses and training, my priestly harborings and professional, courtly suit of the past, I never knew what to do with all those years of one's life: trot around in them forever like old boots--or sever them, let them fly free? Of course, one couldn't really do either. But there was always the trying, and pretending. And then there was finally someplace in between, where one lived.

Tears, she had once been told, were designed to eliminate toxins, and they poured down her face and slimed her neck and gathered in the recesses of her collarbones and she had to be careful never to lie back and let them get into her ears, which might cause the toxins to return and start over. Of course, the rumor of toxins turned out not to be true. Tears were quite pure.

There were about thirty-five people, all of them middle-aged, with the academic's strange mixed expression of merriment and weariness. "A cross between flirtation and a fender bender," Martin had described it once.

A healthy death, like anything — job promotions or looking younger — was simply a matter of "feeling good about yourself." Which is where the sedatives came in. Sedate as a mint, a woman could place a happy hand on the shoulder of death and rasp out, "Waddya say, buddy, wanna dance?

She looked pink and beseeching, though essentially she looked the same, as people do despite the fact they have begun to turn into monsters and are about to tell you something that should require horns or fangs or vaulted eyebrows but never apparently does.

There was sex where you were looked in the eye and beautiful things were said to you, and then there was what Ira used to think of as yoo-hoo sex: where the other person seemed spirited away, not quite there, their pleasure mysterious and crazy and only accidentally involving you. "Yoo-hoo?" was what his grandmother always called before entering a house where she knew someone but not well enough to know whether they were actually home.

This is a political New Year's Eve," says Albert. "We're here to protest the new year, protest the old; generally get a petition going to Father Time.

Ever since Albert was denied promotion to full-professor rank, his articles on Flannery O'Connor ("A Good Man Really Is Hard to Find," "Everything That Rises Must Indeed Converge," and "The Totemic South: The Violent Actually Do Bear It Away!") failing to meet with collegial acclaim, he has become determined to serve others, passing out the notices and memoranda, arranging the punch and cookies at various receptions.