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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
Rather
Literary
Stories
Delicate
Think
Supposed
Thinking
Guess
Memo
Creatures
Memos
Environment
Reviewers
Everybody
Polite
Story
Collections

More quotes by Lorrie Moore

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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
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Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.
Lorrie Moore
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If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry.
Lorrie Moore
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An agony. The exit like the entrance - but reserved. A palindrome: gut-tug.
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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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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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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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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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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[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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(Such a life)engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart.
Lorrie Moore
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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.
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.
Lorrie Moore
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I want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.
Lorrie Moore
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She smiled at him, with longing. 'Where do you live,' she asked, 'and how do I get there?
Lorrie Moore
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Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.
Lorrie Moore
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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
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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.
Lorrie Moore
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One should never turn one's back on a vivid imagination.
Lorrie Moore
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Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.
Lorrie Moore