Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Quotes

“I often think that at the center of me is a voice that at last did split, a house in my heart so invaded with other people and their speech, friends I believed I was devoted to, people whose lives I can simply guess at now, that it gives me the impression I am simply a collection of them, that they all existed for themselves, but had inadvertently formed me, then vanished. But, what: Should I have been expected to create my own self, out of nothing, out of thin, thin air and alone?”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“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?

“I've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“It is unacceptable, all the stunned and anxious missing a person is asked to endure in life. It is not to be endured, not really.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“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, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“I cried for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sent out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are true, you do!”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“My grandmother, who, when I visited, stared at me with the staggering, arrogant stare of the dying, the wise vapidity of the already gone; she refused to occupy the features of her face.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“It reminded me of how children always thought too big; how the world tackled and chiseled them to keep them safe.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“She was, probably, the nicest person I had ever known. Yet in the years following, for myself, I abandoned even believing in niceness or being nice. I could scarcely control myself, wherever I was, from telling everyone, anyone, what I thought of them. It was an urge, a compulsion, my tongue bitten a futile blue. That's a ridiculous thing to say. You must have been spoiled as a child. I couldn't stop myself. You are ungenerous. You parcel yourself out like an expensive spice. You idealize things; you're a narcissist. You seek only to etch impressions of yourself on someone else's face. It's a form of cheapness. You're cheap. You're patronizing. You're a fascist. You're a bully. I've always hated bullies. You look awful in that color. It was as if I'd been hit on the head.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“Things, I know, stiffen and shift in memory, become what they never were before. As when an army takes over a country. Or a summer yard goes scarlet with fall and its venous leaves. One summons the years of the past largely by witchcraft-a whore's arts, collage and brew, eye of newt, heart of horse. Still, the house of my childhood is etched in my memory like the shape of the mind itself: a house-shaped mind-why not? It was this particular mind out of which I ventured-for any wild danger or sentimental stance or lunge at something faraway. But it housed every seedling act. I floated above it, but close, like a figure in a Chagall.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“I remember thinking that once there had been a time when women died of brain fevers caught from the prick of their hat pins, and that still, after all this time, it was hard being a girl, lugging around these bodies that were never right – wounds that needed fixing, heads that needed hats, corrections, corrections.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?: 'So marvellous that it often stops one in one's tracks.' OBSERVER

“They looked like frogs who’d been kissed and kissed roughly, yet stayed frogs.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“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, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“Driving alone along the Northway, feeling more haunted than I really had the courage to be, I cried in the car the way one does when leaving someone in a bitter and unbearable way. I don't know why I should have picked that time to grieve, to summon everything before me--my own monsterousness, my two-bit affections, three-bit, four. It could have been sooner, it could have been later, it could have been one of the hot, awkward funerals (my grandmother's, LaRoue's, my father who one morning in Vero Beach clutched his fiery arm and fell dead off his chair mouthing to my mother, "Help. Heart. I love you" --how every death makes the world a lonelier place), it oculd have been some other time when the sun wasn't so bright, and there was no news on the raido, and my arms were not laced in a bird's nest on the steering wheel, my life going well, I believed, pretty well. It could have been any other time. But it was then: I cried for Sils and LaRoue, all that devotion and remorse, stars streaming light a million years after dying; I cried for the boyfriends I was no longer with, the people and places I no longer knew very well, for my parents and grandmother ailing and stuck in Florida, their rough, unchanging forms conjured only in memory; a jewel box kept in the medicine cabinet in the attic of a house on the moon; that's where their unchanging forms were kept. I cried for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sent out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are true, you do! There was never any containing a song like that, keeping it. It went off and out, speeding out of earshot or imagining or any reach at all, like a rocket invented in sleep.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“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.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“My childhood had no narrative; it was all just a combination of air and no air: waiting for life to happen, the body to get big, the mind to grow fearless. There were no stories, no ideas, not really, not yet. Just things unearthed from elsewhere and popped up later to help the mind get around. At the time, however, it was just liquid, like a song — nothing much. It was just a space with some people in it.

But one can tell a story, anyway.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“You can wake from one dream only to find yourself plunged into yet another, like some endless rosary of the mind. When that happens, it is hard to glimpse what is not dream; the waking, undreamed world flies by you, in rushing flashes of light and air, in loud, quick, dangerous spaces like those between the cars of a train. There is nothing you can do. You walk in the sleep of yourself and wait. You wait for the train to pass.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“I was Baptist and had always prayed, in a damp squint, for things not to happen. Sils was a Catholic, and so she prayed for things to happen, for things to come true. She prayed for love here and now. I prayed for no guns.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“What did I care? I owned nothing of value. Everything would turn out fine. Or else—hell—it would burn. I only wanted my body to bloom and bleed and be loved. I was raw with want, but in part it was a simple want, one made for easy satisfaction, quick drama, deep life. . .”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“To know something you had to be able to go inside and feel, then step outside and look, and then do that again: go inside, feel, then outside and look. You had to do it twice. That was knowledge. Two in a row.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“People alone, trapped, country people, all looked at the sky, I knew. It was the way out somehow, that sky, but it was also the steady, changeless witness to the after and before one's decisions—it witnessed all the deaths that took people away to other worlds—and so people had a tendency to talk to it. [...] I wondered whether I would ever be in love with a boy. Would I? Why not? Why not? Right then and there I vowed and dared and bet that sky and the trees that I would. [...] It would be a boy very far away—and I would go there someday and find him. He would just be there. And I would love him. And he would love me. And we would simply be there together, loving like that, in that place, wherever it was. I had a whole life ahead. I had patience and faith and a headful o songs.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“I feel his lack of love for me.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“They didn’t seem to mind, these men. I swear: often they just didn’t seem to mind. They were half in love already; they were wishing. They wanted servitude to Sils, to get close to her, the prettiness, the breasts, the elegant neck, the long hair fragrant with a girl’s shampoo. We’d dash back to the corner to meet up, and the guy would still be there and we’d climb in, Sils in the front, I in the back, and we’d head up to the lake again and I’d watch the guy’s right arm go slowly up, stealing up behind Sils on the car seat, making its way around her, a cheap stole, and I’d pray there wasn’t a gun. I was a Baptist and had always prayed, in a damp squint, for things not to happen. Sils was a Catholic, and so she prayed for things to happen, for things to come true. She prayed for love here and now. I prayed for no guns. Once, the year before, there had been a gun, a pistol fetched from the guy’s left boot and waved at us in a wobbly way with his right hand. Our hearts beating and the doors unlocked, when he stopped at a Stop sign, we pushed open the car doors and flew out.

Here he was, a man with spurs and a cowboy hat, wildly pointing a gun at two fourteen-year-old girls, yet stopping, carefully, at all the Stop signs.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“There is no place to put such facts, not properly. There is only one’s own mournful horror, one’s worthless moral vanity—which can do nothing. The bad news of the world, like most bad news, has no place to go. You tack it to the bulletin board part of your heart. You say look, you say see. That is all.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“I remember thinking that once there had been a time when women died of brain fevers caught from the prick of their hat pins, and that still, after all this time, it was hard being a girl, lugging around these bodies that were never right—wounds that needed fixing, heads that needed hats, corrections, corrections.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“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?

“There is only one’s own mournful horror, one’s worthless moral vanity—which can do nothing. The bad news of the world, like most bad news, has no place to go. You tack it to the bulletin board part of your heart. You say look, you say see. That is all.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“It reminded me of how children always thought too big; how the world tackled and chiseled them to keep them safe.

Certainly “safe” is what I am now— or am supposed to be. Safety is in me, holds me straight, like a spine. My blood travels no new routes, simply knows its way, lingers, grows drowsy and fond. Though there are times, even recently, in the small city where we live, when I’ve left my husband for a late walk, the moon out hanging upside down like some garish, show-offy bird, like some fantastical mistake— what life of offices and dull tasks could have a moon in it flooding the sky and streets, without its seeming preposterous— and in my walks, toward the silent corners, the cold mulch smells, the treetops suddenly waving in a wind, I’ve felt an old wildness again. Revenant and drunken. It isn’t sexual, not really. It has more to do with adventure and escape, like a boy’s desire to run away, revving thwartedly like a wish, twisting in me like a bolt, some shadow fastened at the feet and gunning for the rest, though, finally, it has always stayed to one side, as if it were some other impossible life and knew it, like a good dog, good dog, good dog. It has always stayed.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“was told later by his mother, he disappeared in the snow, came down with the snow madness that caused men to get into their tractors and just drive off into the blinding white horizon, never coming back.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“Algerians in 1962: how they were herded outside Paris in camps; how many of them were killed, disappeared. How even now, on the outskirts of Paris, Africans in bright ski pants work the toxic jobs, the factories and power plants, how Paris is built and running on the backs of these people, on the back of abominable history. The Nazis, well: Everyone knows about the Nazis.”
― Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?