Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Lorrie Moore
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 13
Faculty Member
Novelist
Writer
Glens Falls
New York
Way
Story
Prose
Actually
Cast
Language
Casts
Use
Narrative
Enlivening
Doesn
Telling
Spell
Stories
Listen
Spells
Matter
Saying
Magical
Something
Happened
Uses

More quotes by Lorrie Moore

Image
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
Image
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
Image
A novel is a daily labor over a period of years. A novel is a job. But a story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.
Lorrie Moore
Image
Things between us were dissolving like an ice cub in a glass: the smaller it got, the faster it disappeared.
Lorrie Moore
Image
An agony. The exit like the entrance - but reserved. A palindrome: gut-tug.
Lorrie Moore
Image
[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
Image
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
Image
They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.
Lorrie Moore
Image
I want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.
Lorrie Moore
Image
One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.
Lorrie Moore
Image
I don't care if I'm a fish, I still want a bicycle.
Lorrie Moore
Image
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.
Lorrie Moore
Image
Most things good for writing are bad for life.
Lorrie Moore
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
A DARK MATTER is a page-turning thriller of every sort: psychological, sociological, epistemological . Plus, it's really scary.
Lorrie Moore
Image
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
Image
It is like having a book out from the library. It is like constantly having a book out from the library.
Lorrie Moore