Quotes from Lorrie Moore

We curl up on the couch together, under a blanket, whisper I love you, I missed you, confusing tenses I think.

If God Speaks Through Burning Bushes, Let's Burn Bush and Listen to What God Says.

We are lucky simply to be alive together; why get differentiating and judgemental about who is here among us? Thank God there is anyone at all.

I had one elegantly folded cookie—a short paper nerve baked in an ear.

They were in performance. They were performing their marriage at me.

John had dreamed so long and hard of this place that he had hoped it right out of existence. Probably no place in the world could withstand such an assault of human wishing.

We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.

Yes, she said. 'I Been Working on the Railroad.'There's just two things I'm worried about with that: the grammar and the use of slave labor.

At that time in my life I was never late. Only a year later would I suddenly have difficulty hanging on to any sense of time, leaving friends sitting, invariably, for a half hour here or there. Time would waft past me undetectably or absurdly - laughably when I could laugh - in quantities I was incapable of measuring or obeying. But that year, when I was twenty, I was as punctual as a priest. Were priests punctual? Cave-raised, divinely dazed, I believed them to be.

A match made in heaven - where do you get those? That's what I want to know!

This was my modest dream come true: unambitious flight. The kind that never even got high enough for a view.

it all remained unreadable for him, though reading, he felt, was not a natural thing and should not be done to people. In general, people were not road maps. People were not hieroglyphs or books. They were not stories. A person was a collection of accidents. A person was an infinite pile of rocks with things growing underneath.

I used to think that those essentially happy and romantic novels that ended with a wedding were all wrong, that they had left out the most interesting part of the story.

Beauty could not love you back. People were not what they seemed and certainly not what they said. Madness was contagious. Memory served melancholy. The medieval was not so bad. Gravity was a form of nostalgia. There could be virtue in satirizing virtue. Dwight Eisenhower and Werner von Braun had the exact same mouths. No one loved a loser until he completely lost. The capital of Burma was Rangoon.

But I was not especially skilled at minding children for long spells; I grew bored, perhaps like my own mother. After I spent too much time playing their games, my mind grew peckish and longed to lose itself in some book I had in my backpack. I was ever hopeful of early bedtimes and long naps.

Mave believed that not being able to see your life clearly, to scrutinize it intelligently, meant that probably you were at the dead center of it, and that couldn't possibly be a bad thing.

Do not resent her. Think about the situation, for instance, when you take the last trash bag from its box: you must throw out the box by putting it in that very trash bag. What was once contained, now must contain. The container, then, becomes the contained, the enveloped, the held.

I don't have a love life. I have a like life.' Mamie smiled. She thought how nice that might be, to be peacefully free from love...

The ants are my friends- they're blowing in the wind

I wished for eternal and intriguing muteness. I would be the Mysterious Dumb Girl, the Enigmatic Elf. The human voice no longer interested me.

Through all the muck of themselves, the times they had unobligated each other, the anger, the permitted absences, the loneliness grown dangerous, she had always returned to him. He'd had faith in that - abracadabra! But eventually the deadlines set in again. Could you live in the dead excellence of a thing - the stupid mortar of a body, the stubborn husk love had crawled from? Yes, he thought.

I guessed that only at the last possible minute did the soul in a determined fashion flee the dying flesh. Who could blame it for its reluctance? We loved our lives more than we ever knew, and at the end felt the bounty of them, as one would say in church, felt even the richness of their missed opportunities, or just understood that they were more than we had realized during the living of them and a lot to give up.

When affection fell on its ass, politeness could step up.

The catalog showed a man sleeping peacefully while his model-wife read a book in soft but focused light. In real life, however, the light was so intense that the same man would have had to wear sunglasses.