Quote

Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.

Lorrie Moore

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Lorrie Moore
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 13
Faculty Member
Novelist
Writer
Glens Falls
New York
Joke
Jokes
Comes
Nothing
Like

More quotes by Lorrie Moore

Image
I want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.
Lorrie Moore
Image
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
Image
(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.
Lorrie Moore
Image
A novel is a daily labor over a period of years. A novel is a job. But a story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.
Lorrie Moore
Image
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
Image
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.
Lorrie Moore
Image
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
Image
But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.
Lorrie Moore
Image
Twenty-year-olds have a kind of emotional idealism about relationships and about the world that enables them to say, 'No, you lied to me. Goodbye.' When they see wickedness, they walk away.
Lorrie Moore
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I don't care if I'm a fish, I still want a bicycle.
Lorrie Moore
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Lorrie Moore
Image
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.
Lorrie Moore
Image
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
Image
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
Image
If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry.
Lorrie Moore