Quotes by Lorrie Moore

“This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.”

“They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.”

“Oh," she said. "I wasn't going to ask, but then you never said anything about it, so I thought I'd ask.""How about you?""Not me," said Odette. She had a poem about marriage. It began, Marriage is t...”

“Marriage, she felt, was a fine arrangement generally, except that one never got it generally. One got it very, very specifically.”

“How quickly bodies came to love each other, promise themselves to each other always, without asking permission. From the mind! If only she could give up her mind, let her heart swell, inflamed, her...”

“She knew there were only small joys in life--the big ones were too complicated to be joys when you got all through--and once you realized that, it took a lot of the pressure off.”

“Through college she had been a feministbasically: she shaved her legs, but just not often enough, she liked to say.”

“The night before, a whole day could have shape and design. But when it was upon you, it could vanish tragically to air.”

“So I needed to be womanised. I was losing my sheen.”

“She wore a lot of gray-green corduroy. She had been under the impression that it brought out her eyes, those shy stars.”

“The turkeys I eat are raised on farms. They're different. They've signed on the dotted line.”

“Bucks, doe thank God everything boils down to money, I always say.""During mating season the doe constructs a bed for herself, and then she urinates all around the outside of it. That's how she ge...”

“It was true. Men could be with whomever they pleased. But women had to date better, kinder, richer, and bright, bright, bright, or else people got embarrassed.”

“A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.”

“I dont 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.”

“But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.”

“But it would be like going to Heaven and not finding any of your friends there. Her life would go all beatific and empty in the eyes.”

“Tell me something wonderful," he said to Dane. "Tell me that we are going to die dreamfully and loved in our sleep.""You're always writing one of your plays on the phone," said Dane."I said, someth...”

“Later I would come to believe that erotic ties were all a spell, a temporary psychosis, even a kind of violence, or at least they coexisted with these states. I noted that criminals as well as the ...”

“What makes humans human is precisely that they do not know the future. That is why they do the fateful and amusing things they do: who can say how anything will turn out? Therein lies the only hope...”