Quotes from Lorrie Moore

More and more he was becoming convinced that it was only through children that one could connect with anything anymore, that in this life it was only through children that one came home, became a home, that one was no longer a visitor.

Don't mistake a lack of sophistication for sweetness.

We feel ourselves moving so minusculely against some process, some momentum, that we become inadvertently a part. We feel too small to fight. Desperation, laziness, horror--they all resemble one another in their flickering movements within us, the same thrashing shorthand. Ma cherie, is this our stop? We feel enslaved--is that what it is--in some turning: of milk to rot to dirt and winds and then to what--to sleep? to stars? Time for another constellation!

Blank is to heartache as forest is to bench.

Before he wrote about them, said Quilty, pretending to read the guidebook out loud, Hemingway shot his characters. It was considered an unusual but not unheard-of creative method. Still, even within literary circles, it is not that widely discussed.

No matter what terror or loveliness the earth could produce—winds, seas—a person could produce the same, lived with the same, lived with all that mixed-up nature swirling inside, every bit.

By about the sixth week the smallness of the class, and whatever makeshift intimacy had sprung up there, became suddenly oppressive to me… suddenly I wanted the anonymity of a large class, where class members did not really have faces and names and problems. In six weeks with Susan, Lodeme, Betty, Valerie, Ellen, Frances, Pat, Marie, Bridget, and Barney, (…) brought to the stubborn limits of our knowability, we were now left with the jagged scrape of our differences.

The prospect of a war has seized his brain. It engages some old, ongoing terror in him. As a former soldier, he still believes in armies. But he believes in armies at rest, armies relaxing, armies shopping at the PX, armies eating supper in the mess hall.

When he slept he did so dreamlessly, like a bug.

This is not a restaurant. Restaurants serve different things from this.

You women today," Mrs. Mallon said. "You expect too much.

Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself.

I wondered about the half-life of regret.

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." -- Willing

I've come to realize that life, while being everything, is also strangely not much. Except when the light shines on it a different way and then you realize it's a lot after all!

I want to create something that doesn't exist exactly in the real world, but exists in a kind of parallel to the real world.

I've been falsely accused of drawing too much from real life. But I am a petty thief - I take little things. And, I mean, I can hardly write 10 words before I start to make things up. I start to invent, because that's what I want to do. I'm running away to an invented place.

When I was in graduate school, I had a teacher who said to me, 'Women writers should marry somebody who thinks writing is cute. Because if they really realised what writing was, they would run a mile.'

An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.

Most things good for writing are bad for life.

I always had the sense with her that she didn't suffer fools gladly but that life was taking great pains to show her how.

Don't make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time.

As the most recently arrived to earthly life, children can seem in lingering possession of some heavenly lidless eye.

But family life sometimes had a vortex, like weather. It could be like a tornado in a quiet zigzag: get close enough and you might see within it a spinning eighteen-wheeler and a woman.