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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
Step
Reader
Think
Teaching
Thinking
Novel

More quotes by Lorrie Moore

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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
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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.
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You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.
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You chose love like a belief, a faith, a place, a box for one's heart to knock against like a spook in the house.
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But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.
Lorrie Moore
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If God Speaks Through Burning Bushes, Let's Burn Bush and Listen to What God Says.
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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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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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.
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An agony. The exit like the entrance - but reserved. A palindrome: gut-tug.
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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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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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 had never feared insomnia before--like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?
Lorrie Moore
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Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.
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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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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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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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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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