Twenty-year-olds have a kind of emotional idealism about…

But I believed in starting over. There was finally, I knew, only rupture and hurt and falling short between all persons, but, Shirley, the…

— Lorrie Moore

I'm very interested in what people will do for money. Money: it's timeless.

— Lorrie Moore

“One of the problems with people in Chicago, she remembered, was that they were never lonely at the same time. Their sadness occurred in…

— Lorrie Moore

“If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your…

— Lorrie Moore

Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.

— Lorrie Moore

“Observing others go through them, he used to admire midlife crises, the courage and shamelessness and existential daring of them, but after he'd watched…

— Lorrie Moore

Start dating someone who is funny, someone who has what in high school you called a "really great sense of humor" and what now…

— Lorrie Moore

You are unhappy because you believe in such a thing as happy.

— Lorrie Moore

“Amber was not shy. If she had been shy, not one of us would be at Perkins right now.”

— Lorrie Moore

People will do anything, anything, for a really nice laugh,

— Lorrie Moore

“Farmers aren't rich. They have land but no money." Actually, my father didn't even have that much land. He had once stood on the…

— Lorrie Moore

“My grandmother, who, when I visited, stared at me with the staggering, arrogant stare of the dying, the wise vapidity of the already gone;…

— Lorrie Moore

I count too heavily on birthdays, though I know I shouldn't. Inevitably I begin to assess my life by them, figure out how I'm…

— Lorrie Moore

“Life is sad. Here is someone.”

— Lorrie Moore

I had never feared insomnia before--like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?

— Lorrie Moore