Quotes from Lorrie Moore

That's not the one you were thinking of? No. There was accusation in her voice. Mine was different

You can wake from one dream only to find yourself plunged into yet another, like some endless rosary of the mind. When that happens, it is hard to glimpse what is not dream; the waking, undreamed world flies by you, in rushing flashes of light and air, in loud, quick, dangerous spaces like those between the cars of a train. There is nothing you can do. You walk in the sleep of yourself and wait. You wait for the train to pass.

in an attempt at extroversion, she had worn a tunic with large slices of watermelon depicted on the front. What had she been thinking of?

No wine, she said. It leads to cheese.

When they slept together, she almost cried. He was a kisser, and he kissed and kissed. It seemed the kindest thing that had ever happened to her. He kissed and whispered and brought her a large glass of water when she asked for one.

They looked at her quizzically, came at her with assumptions, presumptions, what they believed was intimate knowledge of her. She felt unarmed, by comparison; disadvantaged.

I looked in vain for LaRoue, my cruelty towards her now in me like a splinter, where it would sit for years in my helpless memory, the skin growing around; what else can memory do? It can do nothing: It pretends to eat the shrapnel of your acts, yet it cannot swallow or chew.

We used awesome the way the British used brilliant: for anything at all. Perhaps . . . it was a kind of antidepressant: inflated rhetoric to keep the sorry truth at bay.

The thought balloon of my own breath said, How have I found myself here?

He was thinking, but she could tell he wasn't good at it....'Where do you live,' she asked, 'and how do I get there?

Observing others go through them, he used to admire midlife crises, the courage and shamelessness and existential daring of them, but after he'd watched his own wife, a respectable nursery school teacher, produce and star in a full-blown one of her own, he found the sufferers of such crises not only self-indulgent but greedy and demented, and he wished them all weird unnatural deaths with various contraptions easily found in garages.

I loved to say quasi. I was saying it now a lot, instead of sort of, or kind of, and it had become a tic. I am quasi ready to go, I would announce. Or, I'm feeling a bit quasi today. Murph called me Quasimodo. Or Kami-quasi. Or wild and quasi girl.

From here on in, many things can happen. But the main one will be this: you decide not to go to law school after all, and, instead, you spend a good, big chunk of your adult life telling people how you decided not to go to law school after all. Somehow you end up writing again.

I tried not to think of my one excursion to Whole Foods, over a year ago, where I found myself paralyzed by all the special food for special people, whose special murmurings seemed to be saying, Out of my way! I want a Tofurkey!

Biri sizden ayr?ld???nda tüm çekiciliÄŸinizi kaybedersiniz ve kar?? taraf?n yeni bir baÅŸlang?ç yaparken size dair beslediÄŸi tüm kuÅŸkular böylece kan?tlanm?? olur.

I was Baptist and had always prayed, in a damp squint, for things not to happen. Sils was a Catholic, and so she prayed for things to happen, for things to come true. She prayed for love here and now. I prayed for no guns.

Farmers aren't rich. They have land but no money. Actually, my father didn't even have that much land. He had once stood on the porch and flung his arms out and said, Someday kids, all this will be yours. But his knuckles hit the porch supports. Even the porch wasn't that big.

I tried to live cautiously - or eventually learned to try to live - in a spirit of regret prevention, and I could not see how Bonnie could accomplish such a thing in this situation. Regret - operatic, oceanic, fathomless - seemed to stretch before her in every direction. No matter which path she took, regret would stain her feet and scratch her arms and rain down on her, lightlessly and lifelong. It had already begun.

I'm going to marry you till you puke.

Perhaps everyone had their own way of preparing to die. Life got you ready.

If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

I can't believe I just asked you to hold my hand,' said Ira, but Mike had already taken it.

Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real.

Her body was a mix of thin and plump, her skin lined and unlined, in that rounding-the-corner-to-fifty way. Age and youth , he chanted silently, youth and age, sing their songs on the very same stage .