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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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Lorrie Moore
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 13
Faculty Member
Novelist
Writer
Glens Falls
New York
Within
Tornado
Family
Vortex
Woman
Tornadoes
Might
Eighteen
Enough
Spinning
Sometimes
Weather
Life
Quiet
Zigzag
Like
Close
Wheeler

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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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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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.
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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 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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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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An agony. The exit like the entrance - but reserved. A palindrome: gut-tug.
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.
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A DARK MATTER is a page-turning thriller of every sort: psychological, sociological, epistemological . Plus, it's really scary.
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You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.
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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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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.
Lorrie Moore
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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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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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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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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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Things between us were dissolving like an ice cub in a glass: the smaller it got, the faster it disappeared.
Lorrie Moore
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Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.
Lorrie Moore