Lorrie Moore Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Lorrie Moore's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Writer Lorrie Moore's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 138 quotes on this page collected since January 13, 1957! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • Blasts from the past were like the rooms one entered and re-entered in dreams: they would not stay nailed down. When you returned to them, they had changed - they suddenly had more space or a tilt or a door that had not been there before. New people were milling around, the floors undulated, and the sun shone newly, strangely in the windows, or through the now blasted-open ceiling, or else it shone not at all, as if having fled the sky.

  • I often think that at the center of me is a voice that at last did split, a house in my heart so invaded with other people and their speech, friends I believed I was devoted to, people whose lives I can simply guess at now, that it gives me the impression I am simply a collection of them, that they all existed for themselves, but had inadvertently formed me, then vanished. But, what: Should I have been expected to create my own self, out of nothing, out of thin, thin air and alone?

  • If one loves stories, then one would naturally love the story of the story. Or the story behind the story, pick your preposition. It does seem to me to be a kind of animal impulse almost, a mammalian curiosity. For a reader to wonder about the autobiography in a fiction may be completely unavoidable and in fact may speak to the success of a particular narrative, though it may also speak to its failure.

  • Plots are for dead people.

  • If prose can cast a spell, we will listen to it no matter what it's saying. If a narrative uses language in a magical and enlivening way, we will listen to the story. But if the language doesn't cast a spell, we will listen to it only if it is telling us something that actually happened.

    The Believer interview, www.believermag.com. October 2005.
  • Perhaps one would be wise when young even to avoid thinking of oneself as a writer - for there's something a little stopped and satisfied, too healthy, in that. Better to think of writing, of what one does as an activity, rather than an identity - to write, I write; we write; to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun; to keep working at the thing, at all hours, in all places, so that your life does not become a pose, a pornography of wishing.

  • I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it.

  • She was not good on the phone. She needed the face, the pattern of eyes, nose, trembling mouth... People talking were meant to look at a face, the disastrous cupcake of it, the hide-and-seek of the heart dashing across. With a phone, you said words, but you never watched them go in. You saw them off at the airport but never knew whether there was anyone there to greet them when they got off the plane.

    FaceBook post by Lorrie Moore from Jan 21, 2012
  • A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

    FaceBook post by Lorrie Moore from Jul 23, 2012
  • 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.

    FaceBook post by Lorrie Moore from Dec 15, 2010
  • As the most recently arrived to earthly life, children can seem in lingering possession of some heavenly lidless eye.

  • If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry.

    Lorrie Moore (2014). “Bark”, p.117, Faber & Faber
  • Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.

  • An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.

  • I want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.

  • If I retain any freshness of approach, it's by going slowly having long intervals between finished projects.

    "'I would like to live in that year forever.'". Interview with Michael Hafford, logger.believermag.com. April 24, 2014.
  • The affectionate farce I make of him ignores the ways I feel his lack of love for me. But we are managing.

    Lorrie Moore (2012). “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital”, p.4, Vintage
  • My new apartment might be a place where there are lots of children. They might gather on my porch to play, and when I step out for groceries, they will ask me, "Hi, do you have any kids?" and then, "Why not, don't you like kids?" "I like kids," I will explain. "I like kids very much." And when I almost run over them with my car, in my driveway, I will feel many different things.

    Lorrie Moore (2012). “Anagrams”, p.53, Vintage
  • To me, writing is much freer than dancing. With writing, you could do it whenever you wanted. You didnt have to do little exercises and stay in shape. You could have great moments of inspiration that advanced the story. In dance, unless youre going to choreograph things yourself, youre at the service of someone else.

    "Community life" by Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. June 6, 2008.
  • It was like the classic scene in the movies where one lover is on the train and one is on the platform and the train starts to pull away, and the lover on the platform begins to trot along and then jog and then sprint and then gives up altogether as the train speeds irrevocably off. Except in this case I was all the parts: I was the lover on the platform, I was the lover on the train. And I was also the train.

  • Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.

    Lorrie Moore (2012). “Like Life”, p.172, Vintage
  • 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...She had become him: she longed for these women. But she was also herself, and so she despised them. She lusted after them, but she also wanted to beat them up. A rapist. She had become a rapist, driving to work in a car.

  • No matter that you anticipate a thing; you get so used to it as part of the future that its actuality, its arrival, its force and presence, startles you, takes you by surprise, as would a ghost suddenly appearing in the room wearing familiar perfume and boots.

    FaceBook post by Lorrie Moore from Sep 11, 2014
  • After a childhood of hungering to be an adult, my hunger had passed. Unexpected fates had begun to catch my notice. These middle-aged women seemed very tired to me, as if hope had been wrung out of them and replaced with a deathly, walking sort of sleep.

    Lorrie Moore (2009). “A Gate at the Stairs”, p.36, Vintage
  • The detachment of the artist is kind of creepy. It's kind of rude, and yet really it's where art comes from. It's not the same as courage. It's closer to bad manners than to courage. If you're going to be a writer, you basically have to say, 'this is just who I am'. There's a certain indefensibility about it. It's not about loving your community and taking care of it — you're not attached to the chamber of commerce. It's a little unsafe. You have to be willing to have only four friends, not 11.

    Art  
    "Lorrie Moore" by Louisa Kamps, www.elle.com. September 16, 2009.
  • Personally I've never put much store by honesty- I mean how can you trust a word whose first letter you don't even pronounce

    Lorrie Moore (2012). “Anagrams”, p.123, Vintage
  • 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!

    Lorrie Moore (2009). “A Gate at the Stairs”, p.320, Faber & Faber
  • If I had a staff of even one person, or could tolerate a small amphetamine habit, or entertain the possibility of weekly blood transfusions, or had been married to Vera Nabokov, or had a housespouse of even minimal abilities, a literary life would be easier to bring about. (In my mind I see all your male readers rolling their eyes. But your female ones - what is that? Are they nodding in agreement? Are their fists in the air?)

  • One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

    Lorrie Moore (2010). “The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore”, p.444, Faber & Faber
  • I always do the wrong. I do the wrong thing so much that the times I actually do the right thing stand out so brightly in my memory that I forget I always do the wrong thing.

    Lorrie Moore (2009). “A Gate at the Stairs”, p.36, Faber & Faber
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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 138 quotes from the Writer Lorrie Moore, starting from January 13, 1957! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!