"This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic."
— Lorrie Moore (Like Life)

"Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks."
— 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 (Anagrams)

""The thing to remember about love affairs," says Simone, "is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney."
...

"We have raccoons sometimes in our chimney," explains Simone.
"And once we tried to smoke them out. We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back. Instead, they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames and running madly around until they dropped dead." Simone swallows some wine. "Love affairs are like that," she says. "They are all like that.""
— Lorrie Moore

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

"Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation."
— Lorrie Moore

"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."
— 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 (Birds of America: Stories)

""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 (Self-Help: Stories)

"There were moments bristling with deadness, when she looked out at her life and went, "What?" Or worse, feeling interrupted and tired, "Wha—?"
— Lorrie Moore (Birds of America: Stories)

"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 (Like Life)

"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 (Birds of America: Stories)

"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

"Make a list of all the lovers you've ever had.

Warren Lasher
Ed "Rubberhead" Catapano
Charles Deats or Keats
Alfonse

Tuck it in your pocket. Leave it lying around, conspicuously. Somehow you lose it. Make "mislaid" jokes to yourself. Make another list."
— Lorrie Moore

"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-uup 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

"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

"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 (Self-Help: Stories)

"I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it. "
— Lorrie Moore (Anagrams)

"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

"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 (Birds of America: Stories)

"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. "
— Lorrie Moore (Like Life)

""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 (Self-help)

"It is like having a book out from the library.
It is like constantly having a book out from the library."
— Lorrie Moore (Self-Help: Stories)

"I've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change."
— Lorrie Moore (Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?)

""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 (Birds of America: Stories)

"Start dating someone who is funny, someone who has what in high school you called a "really great sense of humor" and what now your creative writing class calls "self-contempt giving rise to comic form." Write down all of his jokes, but don't tell him you are doing this. Make up anagrams of his old girlfriend's name and name all of your socially handicapped characters with them. Tell him his old girlfriend is in all of your stories and then watch how funny he can be, see what a really great sense of humor he can have."
— Lorrie Moore

"(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. "
— Lorrie Moore (Birds of America: Stories)

"She smiled at him, with longing. 'Where do you live,' she asked, 'and how do I get there?'"
— 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 (Self-Help: Stories)

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

""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. "
— Lorrie Moore (A Gate at the Stairs)

""All the world's a stage we're going through.""
— Lorrie Moore (Anagrams)

"'On-yez, where are you from, dear?' asked a black-slacked, frosted-haired woman whose skin was papery and melanomic with suntan. 'Originally.' She eyed Agnes's outfit as if it might be what in fact it was: a couple of blue things purchased in a department store in Cedar Rapids.

'Where am I from?' Agnes said it softly. 'Iowa.' She had a tendency not to speak up.

'Where?' the woman scowled, bewildered.

'Iowa,' Agnes repeated loudly.

The woman in black touched Agnes's wrist and leaned in confidentially. She moved her mouth in a concerned and exaggerated way, like an exercise. 'No, dear,' she said. 'Here we say O-hi-o.'
"
— Lorrie Moore (Birds of America: Stories)

"Philosophize: you are a mistress, part of a great hysterical you mean historical tradition. Wive are like cockroaches. Also part of a great historical tradition. They will survive you after a nuclear attack--they are tough and hardy and travel in packs--but right not they're not having any fun."
— 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

"How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveler’s mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye’s instructions, is necessarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. All that unsayable life! That’s where the narrator comes in. The narrator comes with her kisses and mimicry and tidying up. The narrator comes and makes a slow, fake song of the mouth’s eager devastation.""
— Lorrie Moore (Birds of America: Stories)

"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 - 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.
('Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People')"
— Lorrie Moore (Birds of America: Stories)

"How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, pressing her mouth upon the traveler's mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye's instructions, is necessarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. All that unsayable life! That;s where the narrator comes in. The narrator comes with her kisses and mimicry and tidying up. The narrator comes and makes a slow fake song of the mouth's devastation."
— Lorrie Moore

"Those are the love killers. They love you and then they kill you. They're from another planet. Supposedly."
— 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 (Birds of America: Stories)

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

"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?'"
— Lorrie Moore

"She was afraid, and the afraid, she realized, sought opportunities for bravery in love."
— Lorrie Moore (Like Life)

"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."
— Lorrie Moore (Like Life)

"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."
— Lorrie Moore (Birds of America: Stories)

"I had one elegantly folded cookie—a short paper nerve baked in an ear."
— Lorrie Moore

"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."
— Lorrie Moore (Who Will Run the Frog Hospital)

"The situation was not easy for her, they knew. Once, at the start of last semester, she had skipped into her lecture hall singing "Getting to Know You" - both verses. At the request of the dean the chairman had called her into his office, but did not ask her for an explanation, not really. He asked her how she was and then smiled in an avuncular way. She said, "Fine," and he studied the way she said it, her front teeth catching on the inside of her lower lip. She was almost pretty, but her face showed the strain and ambition of always having been close but not quite."
— Lorrie Moore (Like Life)

"When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet," she writes. "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

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