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Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.

Lorrie Moore

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Lorrie Moore
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 13
Faculty Member
Novelist
Writer
Glens Falls
New York
Comes
Buried
Tension
Release
Surprise
Humor

More quotes by Lorrie Moore

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Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.
Lorrie Moore
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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.
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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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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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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An agony. The exit like the entrance - but reserved. A palindrome: gut-tug.
Lorrie Moore
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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
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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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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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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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I did think reviewers were supposed to be polite about story collections - collections are rather delicate creatures in the literary environment - but not everybody got this memo, I guess.
Lorrie Moore
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Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.
Lorrie Moore
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I've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change.
Lorrie Moore
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Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.
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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Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.
Lorrie Moore
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[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
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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
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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.
Lorrie Moore
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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.
Lorrie Moore