Lorrie Moore

“It's two against one out here; we just keep taking turns.”

— Lorrie Moore

I always feel that the book I'm working on is my last book.

— Lorrie Moore

All the world's a stage we're going through.

— Lorrie Moore

Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.

— Lorrie Moore

Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.

— Lorrie Moore

“Every family is a family of alligators.”

— Lorrie Moore

I don't have a love life. I have a like life.

— Lorrie Moore

Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.

— Lorrie Moore

An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.

— Lorrie Moore

“His eyes were caught in the headlights of something - foreign policy?”

— Lorrie Moore

I think women do write politically all the time. Margaret Atwood does; Doris Lessing does.

— Lorrie Moore

“though what bird in the best of circumstances does not look a little stricken?”

— Lorrie Moore

“My mother's capacity for happiness was a small soup bone salting a large pot.”

— Lorrie Moore

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

— Lorrie Moore

“The key to marriage, she concluded, was just not to take the thing too personally.”

— Lorrie Moore

Those are the love killers. They love you and then they kill you. They're from another planet. Supposedly.

— Lorrie Moore

“the whole idea that people have a clue as to how the world works, is just a piece of laughable metaphysical colonialism…

— Lorrie Moore

A story is a kind of biopsy of human life. A story is both local, specific, small, and deep, in a kind…

— Lorrie Moore

“I was Baptist and had always prayed, in a damp squint, for things not to happen. Sils was a Catholic, and so…

— Lorrie Moore

“That I might never have an occasion to wear such a thing or that I might look like the worst sort of…

— Lorrie Moore

I'm surrounded by music; I always was when I was growing up and continue to be. And I love music. And when…

— Lorrie Moore

Twenty-year-olds have a kind of emotional idealism about relationships and about the world that enables them to say, 'No, you lied to…

— Lorrie Moore

“If we were still English we'd be drinking more and driving on the wrong side of the road - pretty much what…

— Lorrie Moore

Everything one reads is nourishment of some sort - good food or junk food - and one assumes it all goes in…

— Lorrie Moore

“This is why a woman makes things up: Because when she dies, those lives she never got to are all going down…

— Lorrie Moore

“At home in Dellacrosse my place in the world of college and Troy and incipient adulthood dissolved and I became an unseemly…

— Lorrie Moore

“At that time in my life I was never late. Only a year later would I suddenly have difficulty hanging on to…

— Lorrie Moore

“He will talk about what "some other people said," and what he and "some other people did," and when he never specifically…

— Lorrie Moore

“For driving, a January thaw was always preferable to actual ice, but when it was over things froze more treacherously than before.…

— Lorrie Moore

“No, we’re not getting married,” I told my mother on the phone when she asked. “He’s going to California and I’m staying…

— Lorrie Moore

“Tell him not to smoke in your apartment. Tell him to get out. At first he protests. But slowly, slowly, he leaves,…

— Lorrie Moore

My new apartment might be a place where there are lots of children. They might gather on my porch to play, and…

— Lorrie Moore

“In the Dictionary 'lumpy jaw' comes just before 'lunacy,' but in life there are no such clues. Suddenly, for no reason, you…

— Lorrie Moore

“Why do you haunt me? You, like a tattoo on my tongue, like the bay leaf at the bottom of every pan.…

— Lorrie Moore

“1976. The Bicentennial. In the laundromat, you want for the time on your coins to run out. Through the porthole of the…

— Lorrie Moore

“Though she would have preferred long ago to have died, fled, gotten it all over with, the body--Jesus, how the body!--took its…

— Lorrie Moore

“She had to learn not to be afraid of a man, the way, in your childhood, you learned not to be afraid…

— Lorrie Moore

“Cold men destroy women,” my mother wrote me years later. “They woo them with something personable that they bring out for show,…

— Lorrie Moore

“She came to this California university for one reason, she reminds herself: the paycheck. Although every time the paycheck arrives the amount…

— Lorrie Moore

“And though he continued never to express a single word of love for me, not in any way of his several languages,…

— Lorrie Moore