Quotes from Lorrie Moore

Later on in life you will learn that writers are merely open, helpless texts with no real understanding of what they have written and therefore must half-believe anything and everything that is said of them.

That I might never have an occasion to wear such a thing or that I might look like the worst sort of Republican doing so probably never occurred to her.

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.

Although Kit and Rafe had met in the peace movement, marching, organizing, making no nukes signs, now they wanted to kill each other. They had become, also, a little pro-nuke.

Which is it, she asked. Is it CLIToris or clotORis? I didn't know. Why didn't I know? It may depend on which you have, I said.

You have everything, she said to Number One. You have too much: money, power, women. It was absurd to talk about these things in a place like Cleveland. But then the world was always small, no matter what world it was, and you just had to go ahead and say things about it.

You only live at once. Which seemed to her all the more reason to be careful, to take it easy, to have an ordinary life.

I remember thinking that once there had been a time when women died of brain fevers caught from the prick of their hat pins, and that still, after all this time, it was hard being a girl, lugging around these bodies that were never right – wounds that needed fixing, heads that needed hats, corrections, corrections.

She had worn a sequined, strapless wedding gown, and left her bridesmaid to wear brightly flowered dresses to fit for a kind of pornographic milkmaid: low-cut and laced up the midriff with a sort of shoelace. What Scarlet O'Hara might have done with a shower curtain, if she were trying to snag a plumber.

Losing confidence was more violent than losing love. Losing love was a slow dying, but losing confidence was a quick coup, a floor that opened right up and swallowed.

Anyone who's read all of Proust plus The Man withour Qualities is bound t be missing out on a few other titles.

Like true friends, they take no hardy or elegant stance loosely choreographed from some broad perspective. They get right in there and mutter Jesus Christ! and shake their heads.

The later-afternoon air of our exhalations hung in brief clouds before us. The thought balloon of my own breath said, How have I found myself here? It was not a theological question. It was one of transportation and neurology.

When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet, she writes. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet.

Sarah'n?n gülmek yerine, Komik, ya da gülümsemek yerine, Ä°lginç, ya da Aptal z?rva geri zekâl?n?n tekisin, demek yerine, Åžey, san?r?m bu ondan biraz daha karma??k, diyen kad?nlardan olmas?ndan korktum. Öyle insanlar?n yan?nda ne yapaca??m? hiç bilemezdim, özellikle de siz konuÅŸtuktan sonra gizemli bir ÅŸekilde Anl?yorum, diyenlerin. Genellikle sadece susard?m.

I'll go see her tonight,' I said. I felt I was a person of my word, and by saying something I could make it so. It was less like integrity perhaps and more like magic.

Even at midnight the city groans in the heat. We have had no rain for quite a while. The traffic sounds below ride the night air in waves of trigonometry, the cosine of a siren, the tangent of a sigh, a system, an axis, a logic to this chaos, yes.

I would look out upon the wildflowers, the mulch of swamps and leaves, the spring mosses greening on the rocks, or the boulderous mountains of street-black snow, whatever season it happened to be- my mittens clotted with ice, or my hands grimy with marsh mud- and from the back of my larynx I'd send part of my voice out toward the horizon and part of it straight up toward the sky. There must have been some pain in me. I wanted to howl and fly and break apart.

Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether.

And yet the deprivation of her intimacy had made a small dent in his heart, and in his breathing, and in the hard candy of his eyes. The thought of her was everywhere but nowhere—an omniscient narrator.

Her rage flopped awkwardly away like a duck. She felt as she had when her cold, fierce parents had at last grown sick and old, stick-boned and saggy, protected by infirmity the way cuteness protected a baby, or should, it should protect a baby, and she had been left with her rage--vestigial, girlhood rage--inappropriate and intact. She would hug her parents good-bye, the gentle, emptied sacks of them, and think Where did you go?

The faces of the panel listening were the very embodiment of skepticism made flesh.

Her voice was husky, vibrating, slightly flat, coming in just under each note like a saucer under a cup.

His eyes were caught in the headlights of something - foreign policy?