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One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

Lorrie Moore

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Lorrie Moore
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 13
Faculty Member
Novelist
Writer
Glens Falls
New York
Make
Shelters
Shelter
Pockets
Build
Inside
Live

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It is like having a book out from the library. It is like constantly having a book out from the library.
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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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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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If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry.
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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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But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.
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We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.
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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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Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.
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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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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 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.
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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've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change.
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Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.
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Plots are for dead people.
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Most things good for writing are bad for life.
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One should never turn one's back on a vivid imagination.
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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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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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