Quote

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
Family
Vortex
Woman
Tornadoes
Might
Eighteen
Enough
Spinning
Sometimes
Weather
Life
Quiet
Zigzag
Like
Close
Wheeler
Within
Tornado

More quotes by Lorrie Moore

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Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.
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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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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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I've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change.
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One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.
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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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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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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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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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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!
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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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I don't care if I'm a fish, I still want a bicycle.
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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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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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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.
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All the world's a stage we're going through.
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If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry.
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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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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