Quotes from Lorrie Moore

Like everyone he knew, he could discern the hollowness in people's charm only when it was directed at someone other than himself.

The affectionate farce I make of him ignores the ways I feel his lack of love for me. But we are managing.

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!

My new apartment might be a place where there are lots of children. They might gather on my porch to play, and when I step out for groceries, they will ask me, Hi, do you have any kids? and then, Why not, don't you like kids? I like kids, I will explain. I like kids very much. And when I almost run over them with my car, in my driveway, I will feel many different things.

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!

This was love, I supposed, and eventually I would come to know it. Someday it would choose me and I would come to know its spell, for long stretches and short, two times, maybe three, and then quite probably it would choose me never again.

One should never turn one's back on a vivid imagination.

You chose love like a belief, a faith, a place, a box for one's heart to knock against like a spook in the house.

The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riveted, but in separate narratives, and so our interactions seemed weird and richly meaningless, like the characters in a Tennessee Williams play, with their bursting unimportant, but spell-bindingly mad speeches.

A story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend

And it was then that she first felt all the dark love and shame that came from the pure accident of home, the deep and arbitrary place that happened to be yours.

Perhaps she drives men away. Perhaps, without even being able to help herself, she just puts men into her ill-tempered car and drives them off: to quarries, dumps, small anonymous bodies of water.

Forgiveness lives alone and far off down the road, but bitterness and art are close, gossipy neighbors, sharing the same clothesline, hanging out their things, getting their laundry confused.

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.

My grandmother, who, when I visited, stared at me with the staggering, arrogant stare of the dying, the wise vapidity of the already gone; she refused to occupy the features of her face.

So much urgent and lifelike love went rumbling around underground and died there, never got expressed at all, so let some errant inconvenient attraction have its way. There was so little time

She smiled at him, with longing. 'Where do you live,' she asked, 'and how do I get there?

though what bird in the best of circumstances does not look a little stricken?

Those are the love killers. They love you and then they kill you. They're from another planet. Supposedly.

Mostly, however, he had books about love. He believed in studying his own heart this way.

Everyone these days was defensive about their lives. Everyone had settled.

Forget being a decent man, Terence. Go for castability. Could you even play a decent man in a movie?

Things, however, rarely happened the way you understood them. Mostly they just sort of drove up alongside what you thought was the case and then moved randomly down some other way.

She had already—carefully, obediently—stepped through all the stages of bereavement: anger, denial, bargaining, Häagen-Dazs, rage.