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When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet.

Lorrie Moore

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Lorrie Moore
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 13
Faculty Member
Novelist
Writer
Glens Falls
New York
Thought
Essentially
Many
Six
Mean
Shoes
Things
Older
Meant
Feet
Wrong
Means
Mistress

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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.
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Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.
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One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.
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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.
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A DARK MATTER is a page-turning thriller of every sort: psychological, sociological, epistemological . Plus, it's really scary.
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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.
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I don't care if I'm a fish, I still want a bicycle.
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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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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
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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.
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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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We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.
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(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.
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I've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change.
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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.
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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.
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Things between us were dissolving like an ice cub in a glass: the smaller it got, the faster it disappeared.
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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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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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All the world's a stage we're going through.
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