Lorrie Moore Quotes

Oh, the beautiful smiles of the insane. Soon, he was sure, there would be a study that showed that the mentally ill were actually more attractive than other people. Dating proved it!

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

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

Things between us were dissolving like an ice cub in a glass: the smaller it got, the faster it disappeared.

This is Quilty's audition ritual: whenever he feels it is time for it, he calls upon himself to audition for love. He has no script, no reliable sense of stage, just a faceful of his heart's own greas...

This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she’d noticed a lot in the people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. They played around and lied to their spouses. But they re...

Through college she had been a feminist—basically: she shaved her legs, but just not often enough, she liked to say.

Wake up one morning with a man you had thought you'd spend your life with, and realize, a rock in your gut, that you don't even like him. Spend a weepy afternoon in his bathroom, not coming out when h...

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.

Why not admit history's power to divide and destroy? Why attach ourselves to the age-old stories in the belief that they are truer than the new ones? By living in the past, you always know what comes...

You emptied the top rack of the dishwasher but not the bottom, so the clean dishes have gotten all mixed up with the dirty ones - and now you want to have sex?

You live if you dance to the voice that ails you.

A smile, a weird one, nestled in his mouth like an egg.

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

And all love that had overtaken her would have to be a memory, a truck on the interstate roaring up from the left, a thing she must let pass.

Basically, I realized I was living in that awful stage of life between twenty-six to and thirty-seven known as . It's when you don't know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, a...

Begin to wonder what you do write about. Or if you have anything to say. Or even if there is such a thing as a thing to say. Limit these thoughts to no more than ten minutes a day; like sit-ups, they...

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...

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.

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, alw...