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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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Lorrie Moore
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 13
Faculty Member
Novelist
Writer
Glens Falls
New York
Steps
Witnessing
Story
Entity
Rather
Tool
Experience
Tools
Stories
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Think
Reader
Thinking
Teaching
Novel
More quotes by Lorrie Moore
One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.
Lorrie Moore
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
Most things good for writing are bad for life.
Lorrie Moore
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
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
Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.
Lorrie Moore
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
It is like having a book out from the library. It is like constantly having a book out from the library.
Lorrie Moore
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
An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.
Lorrie Moore
Twenty-year-olds have a kind of emotional idealism about relationships and about the world that enables them to say, 'No, you lied to me. Goodbye.' When they see wickedness, they walk away.
Lorrie Moore
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
The affectionate farce I make of him ignores the ways I feel his lack of love for me. But we are managing.
Lorrie Moore
Personally I've never put much store by honesty- I mean how can you trust a word whose first letter you don't even pronounce
Lorrie Moore
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
Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.
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
Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.
Lorrie Moore
An agony. The exit like the entrance - but reserved. A palindrome: gut-tug.
Lorrie Moore
Everything one reads is nourishment of some sort - good food or junk food - and one assumes it all goes in and has its way with your brain cells.
Lorrie Moore