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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

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Lorrie Moore
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: January 13
Faculty Member
Novelist
Writer
Glens Falls
New York
Think
Supposed
Thinking
Guess
Memo
Creatures
Memos
Environment
Reviewers
Everybody
Polite
Story
Collections
Rather
Literary
Stories
Delicate

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A DARK MATTER is a page-turning thriller of every sort: psychological, sociological, epistemological . Plus, it's really scary.
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I've come to realize that life, while being everything, is also strangely not much. Except when the light shines on it a different way and then you realize it's a lot after all!
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If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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Love is the answer, said the songs, and that's OK. It was OK, I supposed, as an answer. But no more than that. It was not a solution it wasn't really even an answer, just a reply.
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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.
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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.
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Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.
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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.
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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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[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.
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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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Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.
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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.
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You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.
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I want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.
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