Quote

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
Meant
Feet
Wrong
Means
Mistress
Thought
Essentially
Many
Six
Mean
Shoes
Things
Older

More quotes by Lorrie Moore

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One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.
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Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.
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[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.
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Don't make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time.
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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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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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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!'
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I don’t go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.
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A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph a novel is a film.
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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.
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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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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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It is like having a book out from the library. It is like constantly having a book out from the library.
Lorrie Moore
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I've come to realize that life, while being everything, is also strangely not much. Except when the light shines on it a different way and then you realize it's a lot after all!
Lorrie Moore
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Personally I've never put much store by honesty- I mean how can you trust a word whose first letter you don't even pronounce
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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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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Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.
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She smiled at him, with longing. 'Where do you live,' she asked, 'and how do I get there?
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If God Speaks Through Burning Bushes, Let's Burn Bush and Listen to What God Says.
Lorrie Moore