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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.

Lorrie Moore

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Lorrie Moore
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 13
Faculty Member
Novelist
Writer
Glens Falls
New York
Way
Meant
Begin
Leave
Saying
Knew
Least
Packed
Important
Hello
Something
Goodbye

More quotes by Lorrie Moore

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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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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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Love drains you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight. You are like a house slowly losing its electricity, the fans slowing, the lights dimming and flickering the clocks stop and go and stop.
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Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.
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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.
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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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Plots are for dead people.
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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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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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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.
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If God Speaks Through Burning Bushes, Let's Burn Bush and Listen to What God Says.
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Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.
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I've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change.
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People love gossip because it's slightly removed from actuality. It's a very literary thing... You can hear a great story, and it turns out that it's largely not true. Fiction writing is like gossip. It's not malicious gossip, but it's gossip.
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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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The affectionate farce I make of him ignores the ways I feel his lack of love for me. But we are managing.
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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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I don't care if I'm a fish, I still want a bicycle.
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.
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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