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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
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Lorrie Moore
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 13
Faculty Member
Novelist
Writer
Glens Falls
New York
Rather
Keep
Noun
Doe
Verb
Better
Nouns
Writing
Verbs
Think
Calling
Thinking
Identity
Activity
More quotes by Lorrie Moore
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.
Lorrie Moore
I want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.
Lorrie Moore
You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.
Lorrie Moore
Perhaps she drives men away. Perhaps, without even being able to help herself, she just puts men into her ill-tempered car and drives them off: to quarries, dumps, small anonymous bodies of water.
Lorrie Moore
If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry.
Lorrie Moore
The affectionate farce I make of him ignores the ways I feel his lack of love for me. But we are managing.
Lorrie Moore
Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.
Lorrie Moore
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
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.
Lorrie Moore
I had never feared insomnia before--like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?
Lorrie Moore
Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.
Lorrie Moore
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
Lorrie Moore
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!'
Lorrie Moore
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
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.
Lorrie Moore
An agony. The exit like the entrance - but reserved. A palindrome: gut-tug.
Lorrie Moore
But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.
Lorrie Moore
Don't make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time.
Lorrie Moore
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.
Lorrie Moore
[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