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Most things good for writing are bad for life.

Lorrie Moore

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Lorrie Moore
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 13
Faculty Member
Novelist
Writer
Glens Falls
New York
Writing
Good
Things
Life

More quotes by Lorrie Moore

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Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.
Lorrie Moore
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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!
Lorrie Moore
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They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.
Lorrie Moore
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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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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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A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph a novel is a film.
Lorrie Moore
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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.
Lorrie Moore
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If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry.
Lorrie Moore
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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?
Lorrie Moore
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I want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.
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.
Lorrie Moore
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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
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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
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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.
Lorrie Moore
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(Such a life)engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart.
Lorrie Moore
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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.
Lorrie Moore
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One should never turn one's back on a vivid imagination.
Lorrie Moore
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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.
Lorrie Moore
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I had never feared insomnia before--like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?
Lorrie Moore
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If God Speaks Through Burning Bushes, Let's Burn Bush and Listen to What God Says.
Lorrie Moore