Quotes from Lorrie Moore

It was true. Men could be with whomever they pleased. But women had to date better, kinder, richer, and bright, bright, bright, or else people got embarrassed.

She was wearing an old summer dress as a nightgown, but in the mornings it could work as a dress again, if you just tossed a cardigan over it and put on shoes. In this risky manner, she knew, insanity could encroach.

If you were alone when you were born, alone when you were dying, really absolutely alone when you were dead, why learn to be alone in between? If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. 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.

My mother's capacity for happiness was a small soup bone salting a large pot.

It was not miserable - often I did not miss her at all. But there was sometimes a quick, sinking ache when I walked in the door and saw she was not there. Twice, however, I'd felt the same sinking feeling when she was.

T]he normal and the everyday are often amazingly unstoppable, and what is unimaginable is the cessation of them. The world is resilient, and, no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want to return to their lives and get on with them. A veneer of civilization descends quickly, like a shining rain. Dust is settled.

Marriage, she felt, was a fine arrangement generally, except that one never got it generally. One got it very, very specifically.

Sometimes it seemed that she and rudy were two people attempting to tango, sweating and trying, long after the orchestra had grown tired, long after everyone else had gone home.

But this is the kind of thing that fiction is: it's the unlivable life, the strange room tacked onto the house, the extra moon that is circling the earth unbeknownst to science.

She had expected a pistol to seem light and natural-a seamless extension of her angry feral self.

Win them with your beauty, but catch them off guard with your soul.

I watched my friend Eleanor give birth, she said. Once you've seen a child born, you realize a baby's not much more than a reconstituted ham and cheese sandwich. Just a little anagram of you and what you've been eating for nine months.

She had, without realizing it at the time, learned to follow Nick's gaze, learned to learn his lust...his desires remained memorized within her. She looked at the attractive women he would look at...She had become him: she longed for these women. But she was also herself, and so she despised them. She lusted after them, but she also wanted to beat them up. A rapist. She had become a rapist, driving to work in a car.

Get a Job, she shouted silently to God. Get a real Job.

After a childhood of hungering to be an adult, my hunger had passed. Unexpected fates had begun to catch my notice. These middle-aged women seemed very tired to me, as if hope had been wrung out of them and replaced with a deathly, walking sort of sleep.

Philosophize: you are a mistress, part of a great hysterical you mean historical tradition.

the whole idea that people have a clue as to how the world works, is just a piece of laughable metaphysical colonialism perpetrated upon the wild country of time.

Amber was past tense. We were covering her inanimate face in the white sheet of was.

It reminded me of how children always thought too big; how the world tackled and chiseled them to keep them safe.

He calls you occasionally at the office to ask how you are. You doodle numbers and curlicues on the corners of Rolodex cards. Fiddle with your Phi Beta Kappa key. Stare out the window. You always, always, say: Fine.

I said nothing. If she wasn't careful, everyone would rush out of her life, life out of a burning building.

You can exclude the excluded middle, but when you ride through, on your way to a lonely and more certain place, out the window you'll see everyone you've ever known living there.

I was too fresh from childhood. Subconsciously, my deepest brain still a cupboard of fairy tales, I suppose I believed that if pretty woman was no longer pretty she had done something to deserve it. I had a young girl's belief that this kind of negative aging would never come to me. Death would come to me - I knew this from reading British poetry. But the drying, hunching, blanching, hobbling, fading, fattening, thinning, slowing? I would just not let that happen to moi.

She would try to live life one day at a time, like an alcoholic--drink, don't drink, drink. Perhaps she should take drugs.