110+ Lorrie Moore Quotes On Writing, Insecurity And Insecurity And Jealousy

Lorrie Moore is an American short story writer and novelist. She is known for her humorous and poignant stories that explore the complexities of relationships, family, and life. Her works include the novels Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, Anagrams, and Birds of America, as well as the short story collections Self-Help and Like Life. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Lorrie Moore on life, writing, love.

Top 10 Lorrie Moore Quotes

1. 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.
2. This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.
3. 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.
4. A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.
5. Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.
6. (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.
7. Forgiveness lives alone and far off down the road, but bitterness and art are close, gossipy neighbors, sharing the same clothesline, hanging out their things, getting their laundry confused.
8. To write a short story, you have to be able to stay up all night.
9. I don’t 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.
10. But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.

Lorrie Moore Short Quotes

• I had never feared insomnia before--like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?
• I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it.
• If you're suicidal, and you don't actually kill yourself, you become known as 'wry.
• You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.
• Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.
• Plots are for dead people.
• One should never turn one's back on a vivid imagination.
• Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real.
• Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.
• She was afraid, and the afraid, she realized, sought opportunities for bravery in love.

Lorrie Moore Quotes About Life

But I believed in starting over. There was finally, I knew, only rupture and hurt and falling short between all persons, but, Shirley, the best revenge was to turn your life into a small gathering of miracles. If I could not be anchored and profound, I would try, at least, to be kind. — 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 doing by how many people remember; it's like the old fantasy of attending your own funeral: You get to see who your friends are, get to see who shows up. — Lorrie Moore

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 hairbrush and told, "There you go." -- Willing — Lorrie Moore

I wondered about the half-life of regret. — Lorrie Moore

I've come to realize that life, while being everything, is also strangely not much. Except when the light shines on it a different way and then you realize it's a lot after all! — Lorrie Moore

Decide that you like college life. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life. — Lorrie Moore

Don't make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time. — Lorrie Moore

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

But family life sometimes had a vortex, like weather. It could be like a tornado in a quiet zigzag: get close enough and you might see within it a spinning eighteen-wheeler and a woman. — Lorrie Moore

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

Lorrie Moore Quotes About Writing

People love gossip because it's slightly removed from actuality. It's a very literary thing... You can hear a great story, and it turns out that it's largely not true. Fiction writing is like gossip. It's not malicious gossip, but it's gossip. — Lorrie Moore

the compulsion to read and write - and it seems to me it should be, even must be, a compulsion - is a bit of mental wiring the species has selected, over time, in order, as the life span increases, to keep us interested in ourselves. — Lorrie Moore

If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write. — Lorrie Moore

Most things good for writing are bad for life. — Lorrie Moore

The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, 'Write something you'd never show your mother or father. And you know what they say? I could never do that!' — Lorrie Moore

I do have people in mind when I write. I don't know precisely who they are, however, or how many of them there are. — Lorrie Moore

What do I do when writing isn't going well? Well, I don't write - which is symptom, cure, and cause. And then sometimes I just tell myself, as I'm writing, "I'll fix it later." And sometimes it's true, I do. — Lorrie Moore

Sometimes I ask myself if writing novels is even respectable. — Lorrie Moore

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

Better to think of writing, of what one does, as an activity, rather than an identity to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun. — Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes About Love

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

The affectionate farce I make of him ignores the ways I feel his lack of love for me. But we are managing. — Lorrie Moore

I want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love. — Lorrie Moore

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

For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things. — Lorrie Moore

I missed him. Love, I realized, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that. — Lorrie Moore

I don't have a love life. I have a like life. — Lorrie Moore

You chose love like a belief, a faith, a place, a box for one's heart to knock against like a spook in the house. — Lorrie Moore

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

This was love, I supposed, and eventually I would come to know it. Someday it would choose me and I would come to know its spell, for long stretches and short, two times, maybe three, and then quite probably it would choose me never again. — Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes About Lived

No matter what terror the earth could produce - winds, seas - a person could produce the same, lived with the same, lived with all that mixed-up nature swirling inside, every bit. There was nothing as complex in the world - no flower or stone - as a single hello from a human being. — Lorrie Moore

One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them. — Lorrie Moore

Adults are living increasingly as children: completely in their imaginations. Reading Harry Potter while every newspaper in the country goes out of business. They know so little that is real. — Lorrie Moore

She smiled at him, with longing. 'Where do you live,' she asked, 'and how do I get there? — Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Quotes About Person

You know, I'm just a very boring, not very funny person in person. I don't feel pressured to be otherwise. — Lorrie Moore

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

Personally I've never put much store by honesty- I mean how can you trust a word whose first letter you don't even pronounce — Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore Famous Quotes And Sayings

Writing is both the excursion into and the excursion out of one's life. That is the queasy paradox of the artistic life. It is the thing that, like love, removes one both painfully and deliciously from the ordinary shape of existence. It joins another queasy paradox: that life is an amazing, hilarious, blessed gift and that it is also intolerable. — Lorrie Moore

Pleasantness was the machismo of the Midwest. There was something athletic about it. You flexed your face into a smile and let it hover there like the dare of a cat. — Lorrie Moore

All the way out I listen to the car AM radio, bad lyrics of trailer park love, gin and tonic love, strobe light love, lost and found love, lost and found and lost love, lost and lost and lost love—some people were having no luck at all. The DJ sounds quick and smooth and after-shaved, the rest of the world a mess by comparison. — Lorrie Moore

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! — Lorrie Moore

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

If prose can cast a spell, we will listen to it no matter what it's saying. If a narrative uses language in a magical and enlivening way, we will listen to the story. But if the language doesn't cast a spell, we will listen to it only if it is telling us something that actually happened. — Lorrie Moore

I don't think of any sentence as a "one-liner", but I do pay attention to how people actually speak when they are being funny. Rhythm is key. — Lorrie Moore

When she packed up to leave, she knew that she was saying goodbye to something important, which was not that bad, in a way, because it meant that at least you had said hello to it to begin with. — Lorrie Moore

Awkwardness is where tension is, and tension is where the story is. It's also where the comedy is, which I'm interested in; when it resolves it tends to resolve toward melancholy, a certain resignation, which I find interesting as well. — Lorrie Moore

shopping for clothes is like masturbation - everyone does it, but it isn't very interesting and therefore should be done alone, in an embarrassed fashion, and never be the topic of party conversation. — Lorrie Moore

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

[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

There was the usual dreaminess, I suppose. Also a shyness that caused me - and others - to notice that I could express myself better by writing than by speaking. This is typical of many writers, I think. What is a drawback in childhood is an asset to a literary life. Not being fluent on one’s feet sends one to the page and a habit is born. — 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 me. Goodbye.' When they see wickedness, they walk away. — Lorrie Moore

I've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change. — Lorrie Moore

An agony. The exit like the entrance - but reserved. A palindrome: gut-tug. — Lorrie Moore

Love is a fever," she said. "And when you come out of it you'll discover whether you've been lucky - or not. — Lorrie Moore

No matter that you anticipate a thing; you get so used to it as part of the future that its actuality, its arrival, its force and presence, startles you, takes you by surprise, as would a ghost suddenly appearing in the room wearing familiar perfume and boots. — Lorrie Moore

You couldn't pretend you had lost nothing... you had to begin there, not let your blood freeze over. If your heart turned away at this, it would turn away at something greater, then more and more until your heart stayed averted, immobile, your imagination redistributed away from the world and back only toward the bad maps of yourself, the sour pools of your own pulse, your own tiny, mean, and pointless wants. — Lorrie Moore

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. — Lorrie Moore

I wished for eternal and intriguing muteness. I would be the Mysterious Dumb Girl, the Enigmatic Elf. The human voice no longer interested me. — Lorrie Moore

If God Speaks Through Burning Bushes, Let's Burn Bush and Listen to What God Says. — Lorrie Moore

Editing is just ongoing. I don't count drafts, or know what would fully constitute a draft. But I try to fix as I go. And there's always more to fix. — Lorrie Moore

When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet. — Lorrie Moore

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

She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime. — Lorrie Moore

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

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

I tried not to think about my life. I did not have any good solid plans for it long-term - no bad plans either, no plans at all - and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my friends (marriage, children, law school), sometimes shamed me. Other times in my mind I defended such a condition as morally and intellectually superior - my life was open and ready and free - but that did not make it less lonely. — Lorrie Moore

I feared Sarah was one of those women who instead of laughing said, "That's funny," or instead of smiling said, "That's interesting," or instead of saying, "You are a stupid blithering idiot," said, "Well I think it's a little more complicated than that. — Lorrie Moore

A novel is a daily labor over a period of years. A novel is a job. But a story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend. — Lorrie Moore

We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things. — Lorrie Moore

Everything one reads is nourishment of some sort - good food or junk food - and one assumes it all goes in and has its way with your brain cells. — Lorrie Moore

I always had the sense with her that she didn't suffer fools gladly but that life was taking great pains to show her how. — Lorrie Moore

It was not miserable - often I did not miss her at all. But there was sometimes a quick, sinking ache when I walked in the door and saw she was not there. Twice, however, I'd felt the same sinking feeling when she was. — Lorrie Moore

That is what is wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls - we all have a bit of that - but that they insist every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or value of gesture. The emotional necessity. For them, it is all honesty before kindness, truth before art. Love is art, not truth. It's like painting scenery. — Lorrie Moore

After a childhood of hungering to be an adult, my hunger had passed. Unexpected fates had begun to catch my notice. These middle-aged women seemed very tired to me, as if hope had been wrung out of them and replaced with a deathly, walking sort of sleep. — Lorrie Moore

Perhaps she drives men away. Perhaps, without even being able to help herself, she just puts men into her ill-tempered car and drives them off: to quarries, dumps, small anonymous bodies of water. — Lorrie Moore

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

Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether. — Lorrie Moore

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

If I had a staff of even one person, or could tolerate a small amphetamine habit, or entertain the possibility of weekly blood transfusions, or had been married to Vera Nabokov, or had a housespouse of even minimal abilities, a literary life would be easier to bring about. (In my mind I see all your male readers rolling their eyes. But your female ones - what is that? Are they nodding in agreement? Are their fists in the air?) — Lorrie Moore

I've never been to a dinner party where everyone at the dinner table didn't say something funny. — Lorrie Moore

She had, without realizing it at the time, learned to follow Nick's gaze, learned to learn his lust...his desires remained memorized within her. She looked at the attractive women he would look at...She had become him: she longed for these women. But she was also herself, and so she despised them. She lusted after them, but she also wanted to beat them up. A rapist. She had become a rapist, driving to work in a car. — Lorrie Moore

This was my modest dream come true: unambitious flight. The kind that never even got high enough for a view. — Lorrie Moore

If I retain any freshness of approach, it's by going slowly having long intervals between finished projects. — Lorrie Moore

Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself. — Lorrie Moore

As the most recently arrived to earthly life, children can seem in lingering possession of some heavenly lidless eye. — Lorrie Moore

It was part of being a girl in the '60s that you were creative. — Lorrie Moore

Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks. — Lorrie Moore

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

To me, writing is much freer than dancing. With writing, you could do it whenever you wanted. You didnt have to do little exercises and stay in shape. You could have great moments of inspiration that advanced the story. In dance, unless youre going to choreograph things yourself, youre at the service of someone else. — Lorrie Moore

There seemed nothing so true as a yellow tree. — Lorrie Moore

Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy. — Lorrie Moore

My new apartment might be a place where there are lots of children. They might gather on my porch to play, and when I step out for groceries, they will ask me, "Hi, do you have any kids?" and then, "Why not, don't you like kids?" "I like kids," I will explain. "I like kids very much." And when I almost run over them with my car, in my driveway, I will feel many different things. — Lorrie Moore

A funny line can never exist on its own. It needs to be surrounded by mood and circumstances. — Lorrie Moore

Basically, I realized I was living in that awful stage of life between twenty-six to and thirty-seven known as stupidity. It's when you don't know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don't even have a philosophy about all the things you don't know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight. — Lorrie Moore

You emptied the top rack of the dishwasher but not the bottom, so the clean dishes have gotten all mixed up with the dirty ones - and now you want to have sex? — Lorrie Moore

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

A DARK MATTER is a page-turning thriller of every sort: psychological, sociological, epistemological . Plus, it's really scary. — Lorrie Moore

People will do anything, anything, for a really nice laugh. — Lorrie Moore

Life Lessons by Lorrie Moore

1. Lorrie Moore's work emphasizes the importance of understanding and accepting life's complexities, as well as the need to be resilient in the face of life's challenges.
2. Her work also emphasizes the importance of empathy and understanding in relationships, and the power of storytelling to connect with others.
3. Finally, her work encourages readers to recognize and appreciate the beauty in life's small moments and to find joy in the everyday.