Quote

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

Lorrie Moore

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Lorrie Moore

Image
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.
Lorrie Moore
Image
Better to think of writing, of what one does, as an activity, rather than an identity to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun.
Lorrie Moore
Image
I had never feared insomnia before--like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?
Lorrie Moore
Image
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
Image
I always do the wrong. I do the wrong thing so much that the times I actually do the right thing stand out so brightly in my memory that I forget I always do the wrong thing.
Lorrie Moore
Image
Things between us were dissolving like an ice cub in a glass: the smaller it got, the faster it disappeared.
Lorrie Moore
Image
You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.
Lorrie Moore
Image
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.
Lorrie Moore
Image
She smiled at him, with longing. 'Where do you live,' she asked, 'and how do I get there?
Lorrie Moore
Image
Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.
Lorrie Moore
Image
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.
Lorrie Moore
Image
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
Image
Don't make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time.
Lorrie Moore
Image
They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.
Lorrie Moore
Image
[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.
Lorrie Moore
Image
When she packed up to leave, she knew that she was saying goodbye to something important, which was not that bad, in a way, because it meant that at least you had said hello to it to begin with.
Lorrie Moore
Image
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
Image
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.
Lorrie Moore
Image
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
Image
A novel is a daily labor over a period of years. A novel is a job. But a story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.
Lorrie Moore