Quote

(Such a life)engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart.

Lorrie Moore

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Lorrie Moore
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 13
Faculty Member
Novelist
Writer
Glens Falls
New York
Life
Third
Like
Thirds
World
Despair
Side
Quantities
Sides
Wildly
Hope
Gross
Country
Quantity
Heart
Engaged

More quotes by Lorrie Moore

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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. You will feel you have a kind of wisdom, very mistaken, but a mistake of some power to you and so you will sadly treasure it and grow it.
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I feared Sarah was one of those women who instead of laughing said, That's funny, or instead of smiling said, That's interesting, or instead of saying, You are a stupid blithering idiot, said, Well I think it's a little more complicated than that.
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If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry.
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Love is the answer, said the songs, and that's OK. It was OK, I supposed, as an answer. But no more than that. It was not a solution it wasn't really even an answer, just a reply.
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Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.
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Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.
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They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.
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I want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.
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Rather than a teaching tool, I think a novel is more of a witnessing entity. A witnessing entity? What is that? I just want the reader to step in and experience it as a story.
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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?
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No matter what terror the earth could produce - winds, seas - a person could produce the same, lived with the same, lived with all that mixed-up nature swirling inside, every bit. There was nothing as complex in the world - no flower or stone - as a single hello from a human being.
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Women now were told not to settle for second best, told that they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around.
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You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.
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Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.
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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 can make you thin
Lorrie Moore
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When she packed up to leave, she knew that she was saying goodbye to something important, which was not that bad, in a way, because it meant that at least you had said hello to it to begin with.
Lorrie Moore
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I did think reviewers were supposed to be polite about story collections - collections are rather delicate creatures in the literary environment - but not everybody got this memo, I guess.
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Most things good for writing are bad for life.
Lorrie Moore
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Her life her life had taken on the shape of a terrible mistake. 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 hair-brush and told, There you go. She'd stood there for years, blinking and befuddled, brushing the can with the brush.
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An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.
Lorrie Moore