Lorrie Moore

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

“But there was in the air that kind of distortion that bent you a little; it caused your usual self to grow slippery, to wander off and shop, to get blurry, bleed, bevel with possibility.”

“Writing has to be an obsession - it's only for those who say, 'I'm not going to do anything else.'”

“Nabokov's adventures in language and style and naked braininess are really unparalleled.”

“I nodded, trying to imagine the very particular sadness of a vanished childhood yogurt now found only in France. It was a very special sort of sadness, individual, and in its inability to induce sympathy, in its tuneless spark, it bypassed poetry and entered science.”

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

“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 might start quoting your mother, out loud and with conviction. You might lose your friends to the most uninspired of deaths. You might one day wake up and find yourself teaching at a community college; there will have been nothing to warn you. You might say things to your students like, There is only one valid theme in literature: Life will disappoint you.”

“Some people get their books on the best-seller list and then they count the number of weeks, and I just never want to live that way.”

“I looked in vain for LaRoue, my cruelty toward her now in me like a splinter, where it would sit for years in my helpless memory, the skin growing around; what else can memory do? It can do nothing; It pretends to eat the shrapnel of your acts, yet it cannot swallow or chew.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I've had nonstop financial problems my whole adult life. It's always been a constant balance, year to year: 'Where's the time? Where's the money?'”

“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 the death you want to die, and in front of audiences she never read it with much conviction. Usually she swung her foot back and forth through the whole thing.”

“If you look at most women's writing, women writers will describe women differently from the way male writers describe women. The details that go into a woman writer's description of a female character are, perhaps, a little more judgmental. They're looking for certain things, because they know what women do to look a certain way.”

“I'm not sure that niceness is what we should promote in writers.”

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

“Abby began to think that all the beauty and ugliness and turbulence one found scattered through nature, one could also find in people themselves, all collected there, all together in a single place. No matter what terror or loveliness the earth could produce- wind, 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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”