Lorrie Moore

“Jane gave Heffie an anxious look. It said "Please forgive me." It also said "What is your problem?" and "Have a nice day" 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”

“Back at home, days later, feel cranky and tired. Sit on the couch and tell him he's stupid. That you bet he doesn't know who Coriolanus is. That since you moved in you've noticed he rarely reads. He will give you a hurt, hungry-to-learn look, with his James Cagney eyes. He will try to kiss you. Turn your head. Feel suffocated. (from "How")”

“[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.”

“We are lucky simply to be alive together; why get differentiating and judgemental about who is here among us? Thank God there is anyone at all.”

“Pek çok eski Fransız tüccarı doğayla, özellikle de suyla öyle düşmanca ilişkiler içindeymiş ki isim verdikleri her şey kasvetlerini taşıyordu: bütün hoş tatil yerlerinin adları Fransızcadan Ölümün Kapısı, Dalgaların Mezarı ya da Şeytanın Gölü olarak çevrilmişti.”

“Küçük bir sinek vızlayıp kulağımın yanından geçti, sonra kayboldu. Daha önce hiç Noel'de sinek görmemiştim; Sanat 102 dersinde hissetmemiz öğretildiği gibi, iki tanıdık şeyin beklenmedik şekilde yan yana gelmesinin gerçeküstülüğünü hissederek ona vurdum. Gelecek bu olacaktı.”

“Sarah'nın gülmek yerine, "Komik," ya da gülümsemek yerine, "İlginç," ya da "Aptal zırva geri zekâlının tekisin," demek yerine, "Şey, sanırım bu ondan biraz daha karmaşık," diyen kadınlardan olmasından korktum. Öyle insanların yanında ne yapacağımı hiç bilemezdim, özellikle de siz konuştuktan sonra gizemli bir şekilde "Anlıyorum," diyenlerin. Genellikle sadece susardım.”

“Like true friends, they take no hardy or elegant stance loosely choreographed from some broad perspective. They get right in there and mutter "Jesus Christ!" and shake their heads.”

“Guns, she was reminded then, were not for girls. They were for boys. They were invented by boys. They were invented by boys who had never gotten over their disappointment that accompanying their own orgasm there wasn't a big boom sound.”

“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.”

“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.”

“From here on in, many things can happen. But the main one will be this: you decide not to go to law school after all, and, instead, you spend a good, big chunk of your adult life telling people how you decided not to go to law school after all. Somehow you end up writing again.”

“She was not good on the phone. She needed the face, the pattern of eyes, nose, trembling mouth... People talking were meant to look at a face, the disastrous cupcake of it, the hide-and-seek of the heart dashing across. With a phone, you said words, but you never watched them go in. You saw them off at the airport but never knew whether there was anyone there to greet them when they got off the plane. ”

“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!”

“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.”

“Through all the muck of themselves, the times they had unobligated each other, the anger, the permitted absences, the loneliness grown dangerous, she had always returned to him. He'd had faith in that - abracadabra! But eventually the deadlines set in again. Could you live in the dead excellence of a thing - the stupid mortar of a body, the stubborn husk love had crawled from? Yes, he thought.”

“She was afraid, and the afraid, she realized, sought opportunities for bravery in love.”

“He was thinking, but she could tell he wasn't good at it....'Where do you live,' she asked, 'and how do I get there?”

“And it was then that she first felt all the dark love and shame that came from the pure accident of home, the deep and arbitrary place that happened to be yours.”

“She would try to live life one day at a time, like an alcoholic--drink, don't drink, drink. Perhaps she should take drugs.”

“Which is it," she asked. "Is it CLIToris or clotORis?" I didn't know. Why didn't I know? "It may depend on which you have," I said.”

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

“If God Speaks Through Burning Bushes, Let's Burn Bush and Listen to What God Says.”

“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. I noted that criminals as well as the insane tended to give off a palpable, vibrating allure, a kind of animal magnetism that kept them loved by someone. How else could they survive at all? Someone had to hide them from the authorities! Hence the necessity and prevalence of sex appeal for people who were wild and on the edge.”

“I had one elegantly folded cookie—a short paper nerve baked in an ear.”

“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”

“That was also back in the days when I thought the ice-cream man lived in his truck”

“The ants are my friends- they're blowing in the wind”

“In so many things I loved I was sadly insufficiently gifted and driven. But writing I could plod along with -- and no one discouraged me. People were much kinder. I headed toward the kindness.”

“She had expected a pistol to seem light and natural-a seamless extension of her angry feral self.”

“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.”

“I guessed that only at the last possible minute did the soul in a determined fashion flee the dying flesh. Who could blame it for its reluctance? We loved our lives more than we ever knew, and at the end felt the bounty of them, as one would say in church, felt even the richness of their missed opportunities, or just understood that they were more than we had realized during the living of them and a lot to give up.”

“These were the sorts of notions that had been raised in all my classes, and we had chased them round and round like dogs maddened by their tails.”

“I would look out upon the wildflowers, the mulch of swamps and leaves, the spring mosses greening on the rocks, or the boulderous mountains of street-black snow, whatever season it happened to be- my mittens clotted with ice, or my hands grimy with marsh mud- and from the back of my larynx I’d send part of my voice out toward the horizon and part of it straight up toward the sky. There must have been some pain in me. I wanted to howl and fly and break apart.”

“A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.”

“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.”

“Beauty could not love you back. People were not what they seemed and certainly not what they said. Madness was contagious. Memory served melancholy. The medieval was not so bad. Gravity was a form of nostalgia. There could be virtue in satirizing virtue. Dwight Eisenhower and Werner von Braun had the exact same mouths. No one loved a loser until he completely lost. The capital of Burma was Rangoon.”

“I used to think that those essentially happy and romantic novels that ended with a wedding were all wrong, that they had left out the most interesting part of the story.”

“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!”

“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.”

“Blasts from the past were like the rooms one entered and re-entered in dreams: they would not stay nailed down. When you returned to them, they had changed - they suddenly had more space or a tilt or a door that had not been there before. New people were milling around, the floors undulated, and the sun shone newly, strangely in the windows, or through the now blasted-open ceiling, or else it shone not at all, as if having fled the sky.”

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

“Life was unendurable, and yet everywhere it was endured.”

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

“The faces of the panel listening were the very embodiment of skepticism made flesh.”

“If we were still English we'd be drinking more and driving on the wrong side of the road - pretty much what people do on the Fourth of July anyway.”

“It's a form of terrorism not to bomb this town.”

“You can exclude the excluded middle, but when you ride through, on your way to a lonely and more certain place, out the window you'll see everyone you've ever known living there.”

“Don't make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time.”

“When misfortune accumulated, I could feel now, it strafed you to the thinness of a nightgown, sheared you to the sheerness of a slip.”