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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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Lorrie Moore
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 13
Faculty Member
Novelist
Writer
Glens Falls
New York
Life
Proper
Tools
Decided
Told
Willing
Given
Hairbrush
Real
Gravy
Make
Hadn

More quotes by Lorrie Moore

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She smiled at him, with longing. 'Where do you live,' she asked, 'and how do I get there?
Lorrie Moore
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If you look at most womens writing, women writers will describe women differently from the way male writers describe women. The details that go into a woman writers description of a female character are, perhaps, a little more judgmental. Theyre looking for certain things, because they know what women do to look a certain way.
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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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.
Lorrie Moore
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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
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All the world's a stage we're going through.
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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But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.
Lorrie Moore
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I do have people in mind when I write. I don't know precisely who they are, however, or how many of them there are.
Lorrie Moore
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Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.
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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The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father. And you know what they say? I could never do that!'
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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People love gossip because it's slightly removed from actuality. It's a very literary thing... You can hear a great story, and it turns out that it's largely not true. Fiction writing is like gossip. It's not malicious gossip, but it's gossip.
Lorrie Moore
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I want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.
Lorrie Moore
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An agony. The exit like the entrance - but reserved. A palindrome: gut-tug.
Lorrie Moore
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If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry.
Lorrie Moore
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They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.
Lorrie Moore
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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
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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.
Lorrie Moore