Lorrie Moore Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• [T]he normal and the everyday are often amazingly unstoppable, and what is unimaginable is the cessation of them. The world is resilient, and, no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want to return to their lives and get on with them. A veneer of civilization descends quickly, like a shining rain. Dust is settled.

  Lorrie Moore

  Rain, Dust, Civilization

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• Decide that you like college life. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life.

  Lorrie Moore

  Nice, College, Views

  Lorrie Moore (2010). “The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore”, p.629, Faber & Faber

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• Adults are living increasingly as children: completely in their imaginations. Reading Harry Potter while every newspaper in the country goes out of business. They know so little that is real.

  Lorrie Moore

  Country, Children, Real

  FaceBook post by Lorrie Moore from Jul 17, 2011

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• People will do anything, anything, for a really nice laugh.

  Lorrie Moore

  Nice, People, Laughing

  Lorrie Moore (2010). “The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore”, p.550, Faber & Faber

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• Awkwardness is where tension is, and tension is where the story is. It's also where the comedy is, which I'm interested in; when it resolves it tends to resolve toward melancholy, a certain resignation, which I find interesting as well.

  Lorrie Moore

  Interesting, Stories, Comedy

  The Believer interview, www.believermag.com. October 2005.

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• 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.

  Lorrie Moore

  Stories, Use, Narrative

  The Believer interview, www.believermag.com. October 2005.

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• I love plays. Even bad ones. I like the fact that actual live, breathing people are standing before you in tense situations that you are not personally responsible for.

  Lorrie Moore

  Breathing, Play, People

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• Start dating someone who is funny, someone who has what in high school you called a "really great sense of humor" and what now your creative writing class calls "self-contempt giving rise to comic form." Write down all of his jokes, but don't tell him you are doing this. Make up anagrams of his old girlfriend's name and name all of your socially handicapped characters with them. Tell him his old girlfriend is in all of your stories and then watch how funny he can be, see what a really great sense of humor he can have.

  Lorrie Moore

  Girlfriend, Writing, School

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• 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.

  Lorrie Moore

  Art, Who I Am, Loving You

  "Lorrie Moore" by Louisa Kamps, www.elle.com. September 16, 2009.

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• I wondered about the half-life of regret.

  Lorrie Moore

  Regret, Half, Half Life

  Lorrie Moore (2009). “A Gate at the Stairs”, p.124, Vintage

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• I've never been to a dinner party where everyone at the dinner table didn't say something funny.

  Lorrie Moore

  Party, Tables, Dinner

  "Moore's better blues". www.cnn.com.

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• Better to think of writing, of what one does, as an activity, rather than an identity to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun.

  Lorrie Moore

  Writing, Thinking, Identity

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• Don't make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time.

  Lorrie Moore

  Waste, Wasting Time, Projects

  Lorrie Moore (2009). “A Gate at the Stairs”, p.262, Vintage

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• I don't think of any sentence as a "one-liner", but I do pay attention to how people actually speak when they are being funny. Rhythm is key.

  Lorrie Moore

  Thinking, Keys, People

  "'I would like to live in that year forever.'". Interview with Michael Hafford, logger.believermag.com. April 24, 2014.

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• 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?

  Lorrie Moore

  Sex, Dirty, Want

  Lorrie Moore (2009). “A Gate at the Stairs”, p.202, Faber & Faber

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• I had never feared insomnia before--like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?

  Lorrie Moore

  Insomnia, Giving, Prison

  Lorrie Moore (2009). “A Gate at the Stairs”, p.125, Faber & Faber

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• The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riveted, but in separate narratives, and so our interactions seemed weird and richly meaningless, like the characters in a Tennessee Williams play, with their bursting unimportant, but spell-bindingly mad speeches.

  Lorrie Moore

  Character, Self, Play

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• She smiled at him, with longing. 'Where do you live,' she asked, 'and how do I get there?

  Lorrie Moore

  Longing

  Lorrie Moore (2012). “Birds of America: Stories”, p.23, Vintage

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• Most things good for writing are bad for life.

  Lorrie Moore

  Writing

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

  Lorrie Moore

  Photography, Taxidermy, Sneaky

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• Plots are for dead people.

  Lorrie Moore

  People, Plot, Dead People

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• Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.

  Lorrie Moore

  Lasts, Intimacy, Stage

  FaceBook post by Lorrie Moore from Jul 15, 2011

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• 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.

  Lorrie Moore

  Forgiveness, Art, Confused

  Lorrie Moore (2012). “Self-Help”, p.59, Vintage

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• It is like having a book out from the library. It is like constantly having a book out from the library.

  Lorrie Moore

  Book, Library

  Lorrie Moore (2010). “The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore”, p.537, Faber & Faber

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• There was the usual dreaminess, I suppose. Also a shyness that caused me - and others - to notice that I could express myself better by writing than by speaking. This is typical of many writers, I think. What is a drawback in childhood is an asset to a literary life. Not being fluent on one’s feet sends one to the page and a habit is born.

  Lorrie Moore

  Writing, Thinking, Feet

  "Lorrie Moore, The Art of Fiction No. 167". Interview with Elizabeth Gaffney, www.theparisreview.org. 2001.

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