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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
Rather
Tool
Experience
Tools
Stories
Step
Think
Reader
Thinking
Teaching
Novel
Steps
Witnessing
Story
Entity

More quotes by Lorrie Moore

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If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry.
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Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.
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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.
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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!
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Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.
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Plots are for dead people.
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I had never feared insomnia before--like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?
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Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.
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Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.
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Things between us were dissolving like an ice cub in a glass: the smaller it got, the faster it disappeared.
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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.
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You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.
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When she packed up to leave, she knew that she was saying goodbye to something important, which was not that bad, in a way, because it meant that at least you had said hello to it to begin with.
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All the world's a stage we're going through.
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But family life sometimes had a vortex, like weather. It could be like a tornado in a quiet zigzag: get close enough and you might see within it a spinning eighteen-wheeler and a woman.
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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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It is like having a book out from the library. It is like constantly having a book out from the library.
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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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An agony. The exit like the entrance - but reserved. A palindrome: gut-tug.
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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