Quote

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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Lorrie Moore
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 13
Faculty Member
Novelist
Writer
Glens Falls
New York
Wonder
Write
Thin
Anything
Limit
Writing
Ten
Even
Limits
Thing
Begin
Make
Thoughts
Like
Minutes

More quotes by Lorrie Moore

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The affectionate farce I make of him ignores the ways I feel his lack of love for me. But we are managing.
Lorrie Moore
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Everything one reads is nourishment of some sort - good food or junk food - and one assumes it all goes in and has its way with your brain cells.
Lorrie Moore
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Perhaps she drives men away. Perhaps, without even being able to help herself, she just puts men into her ill-tempered car and drives them off: to quarries, dumps, small anonymous bodies of water.
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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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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. -- Willing
Lorrie Moore
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You chose love like a belief, a faith, a place, a box for one's heart to knock against like a spook in the house.
Lorrie Moore
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Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.
Lorrie Moore
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I always had the sense with her that she didn't suffer fools gladly but that life was taking great pains to show her how.
Lorrie Moore
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One should never turn one's back on a vivid imagination.
Lorrie Moore
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Love drains you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight. You are like a house slowly losing its electricity, the fans slowing, the lights dimming and flickering the clocks stop and go and stop.
Lorrie Moore
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I just don't want you to feel uncomfortable about this, he says. Say: Hey. I am a very cool person. I am tough. Show him your bicep.
Lorrie Moore
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This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she'd noticed a lot in people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. But they recycled their newspapers!
Lorrie Moore
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Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.
Lorrie Moore
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I've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change.
Lorrie Moore
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Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.
Lorrie Moore
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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
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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
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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.
Lorrie Moore
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But family life sometimes had a vortex, like weather. It could be like a tornado in a quiet zigzag: get close enough and you might see within it a spinning eighteen-wheeler and a woman.
Lorrie Moore
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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.
Lorrie Moore