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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
Buried
Tension
Release
Surprise
Humor
Comes

More quotes by Lorrie Moore

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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
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Rather than a teaching tool, I think a novel is more of a witnessing entity. A witnessing entity? What is that? I just want the reader to step in and experience it as a story.
Lorrie Moore
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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
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All the world's a stage we're going through.
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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She smiled at him, with longing. 'Where do you live,' she asked, 'and how do I get there?
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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This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she'd noticed a lot in people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. But they recycled their newspapers!
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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I had never feared insomnia before--like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?
Lorrie Moore
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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
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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.
Lorrie Moore
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I don't care if I'm a fish, I still want a bicycle.
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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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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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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We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.
Lorrie Moore
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Begin to wonder what you do write about. Or if you have anything to say. Or even if there is such a thing as a thing to say. Limit these thoughts to no more than ten minutes a day like sit-ups, they can make you thin
Lorrie Moore
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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!'
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