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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.

Lorrie Moore

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Lorrie Moore
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 13
Faculty Member
Novelist
Writer
Glens Falls
New York
Right
Brightly
Thing
Memory
Much
Memories
Always
Stand
Wrong
Forget
Actually
Times

More quotes by 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.
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Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.
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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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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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If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry.
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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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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.
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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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Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.
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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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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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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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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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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
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One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.
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Women now were told not to settle for second best, told that they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around.
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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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Things between us were dissolving like an ice cub in a glass: the smaller it got, the faster it disappeared.
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Plots are for dead people.
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An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.
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