Lorrie Moore Quotes

There seemed nothing so true as a yellow tree.

I've come to realize that life, while being everything, is also strangely not much. Except when the light shines on it a different way and then you realize it's a lot after all!

There were moments bristling with deadness, when she looked out at her life and went, Or worse, feeling interrupted and tired, Wha—?

They looked like frogs who’d been kissed and kissed roughly, yet stayed frogs.

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

This ceremony of approval was a charade - everything had been decided before we got here - and as with all charades it was wanly ebullient, necessary, and thin.

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

What I really felt was this: chopped down like a tree, a new feeling, and I was realizing that all new feelings from here on in would probably be bad ones. Surprises would no longer be good. And feeli...

We got hard hearts, she said with an accent that wasn't really any particular accent at all. She wasn't good at accents.

I was already becoming a woman who sized up another one fast—I was becoming typical.

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....

Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.

To the right, the clouds have more shape and against the blue look like the figures of a Wedgwood dish. What a fine fucking bowl beneath which they have all been caught and asked to swim out their day...

She had bought several plain pine chests to use as love seats or boot boxes, but they came to look to her more and more like children's coffins, so she returned them.

When you find out who you are, you will no longer be innocent. That will be sad for others to see. All that knowledge will show on your face and change it. But sad only for others, not for yourself. Y...

Bummer,' said Ira, his new word for I must remain as neutral as possible and Your mother's a whore.

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.

She hadn’t been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She’d been given a can of gravy and a hairbrush and told, There you go. She’d stood there for years, blinking...

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...S...

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