Quote

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.

Lorrie Moore

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Lorrie Moore
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 13
Faculty Member
Novelist
Writer
Glens Falls
New York
Make
Terrible
Brushes
Life
Hair
Stood
Told
Hadn
Mistake
Proper
Befuddled
Taken
Shape
Blinking
Given
Tools
Gravy
Real
Shapes
Brushing
Years
Decided
Brush

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I had never feared insomnia before--like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?
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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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She smiled at him, with longing. 'Where do you live,' she asked, 'and how do I get there?
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You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.
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All the world's a stage we're going through.
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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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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
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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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But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.
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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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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.
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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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They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.
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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.
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Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.
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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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Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.
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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!
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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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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.
Lorrie Moore