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

Lorrie Moore

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

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You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.
Lorrie Moore
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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
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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
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Perhaps she drives men away. Perhaps, without even being able to help herself, she just puts men into her ill-tempered car and drives them off: to quarries, dumps, small anonymous bodies of water.
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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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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I've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change.
Lorrie Moore
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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.
Lorrie Moore
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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
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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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Plots are for dead people.
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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You emptied the top rack of the dishwasher but not the bottom, so the clean dishes have gotten all mixed up with the dirty ones - and now you want to have sex?
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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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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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
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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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[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.
Lorrie Moore
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An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.
Lorrie Moore
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The affectionate farce I make of him ignores the ways I feel his lack of love for me. But we are managing.
Lorrie Moore