Quotes by Lorrie Moore

“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 g...”

“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...”

“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...”

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

“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.”

“Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain, hope played like a playing card upon another hope, a wish for kindness and mercies to emerge like kings and que...”

“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.”

“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...”

“In the Dictionary 'lumpy jaw' comes just before 'lunacy,' but in life there are no such clues. Suddenly, for no reason, you might start to dribble from the mouth, to howl peevishly at the moon. You...”

“Mave believed that not being able to see your life clearly, to scrutinize it intelligently, meant that probably you were at the dead center of it, and that couldn't possibly be a bad thing.”

“Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.”

“This is why a woman makes things up: Because when she dies, those lives she never got to are all going down with her. All those possibilities will just site there like a bunch of school kids with t...”

“Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You didn't have to go looking for it with open arms. With o...”

“If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. Yo...”

“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!”