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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.

Lorrie Moore

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Lorrie Moore
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 13
Faculty Member
Novelist
Writer
Glens Falls
New York
Perhaps
Help
Helping
Cannot
Done
Coldness
Something
Numbness
World
Detachment
Emptiness

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Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.
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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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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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Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.
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Most things good for writing are bad for life.
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One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.
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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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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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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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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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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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Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.
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Don't make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time.
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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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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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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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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 smiled at him, with longing. 'Where do you live,' she asked, 'and how do I get there?
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If God Speaks Through Burning Bushes, Let's Burn Bush and Listen to What God Says.
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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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