Quote

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.

Lorrie Moore

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Lorrie Moore
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 13
Faculty Member
Novelist
Writer
Glens Falls
New York
Heart
Spook
Love
Knock
Like
Chose
Boxes
Belief
Faith
House
Place

More quotes by Lorrie Moore

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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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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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Love is the answer, said the songs, and that's OK. It was OK, I supposed, as an answer. But no more than that. It was not a solution it wasn't really even an answer, just a reply.
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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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You emptied the top rack of the dishwasher but not the bottom, so the clean dishes have gotten all mixed up with the dirty ones - and now you want to have sex?
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Most things good for writing are bad for life.
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When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet.
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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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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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Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.
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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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Don't make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time.
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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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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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Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.
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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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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.
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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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 go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.
Lorrie Moore