Quote

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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Lorrie Moore
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 13
Faculty Member
Novelist
Writer
Glens Falls
New York
Feel
Knowledge
Treasure
Feels
Faces
Innocent
Kind
Show
Grow
Others
Longer
Shows
Mistake
Change
Grows
Power
Wisdom
Sadly
Find
Face
Mistaken

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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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I don't care if I'm a fish, I still want a bicycle.
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Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.
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I've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change.
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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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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.
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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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Begin to wonder what you do write about. Or if you have anything to say. Or even if there is such a thing as a thing to say. Limit these thoughts to no more than ten minutes a day like sit-ups, they can make you thin
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I had never feared insomnia before--like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?
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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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I want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.
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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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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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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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[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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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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Things between us were dissolving like an ice cub in a glass: the smaller it got, the faster it disappeared.
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Don't make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time.
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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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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