Self-Help Quotes

“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

“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.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“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

“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, 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

“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

“Wake up one morning with a man you had thought you'd spend your life with, and realize, a rock in your gut, that you don't even like him. Spend a weepy afternoon in his bathroom, not coming out when he knocks. You can no longer trust your affections. People and places you think you love may be people and places you hate.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“After four movies, three concerts, and two-and-a-half museums, you sleep with him. It seems the right number of cultural events.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“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

“This danish is too sweetish to finish.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“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.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“Love is art, not truth. It's like painting a scenery.' These are the things one takes from mothers. Once they die, of course, you get the strand of pearls, the blue quilt, some of the original wedding gifts - a tray shellacked with the invitation, an old rusted toaster - but the touches and the words and the moaning the night she dies, these are what you seize, save, carry around in little invisible envelopes, opening them up quickly, like a carnival huckster, giving the world a peek. They will not stay quiet. No matter how you try.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“We curl up on the couch together, under a blanket, whisper I love you, I missed you, confusing tenses I think.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“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, Self-Help

“Philosophize: you are a mistress, part of a great hysterical you mean historical tradition.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“He calls you occasionally at the office to ask how you are. You doodle numbers and curlicues on the corners of Rolodex cards. Fiddle with your Phi Beta Kappa key. Stare out the window. You always, always, say: "Fine.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“Do not resent her. Think about the situation, for instance, when you take the last trash bag from its box: you must throw out the box by putting it in that very trash bag. What was once contained, now must contain. The container, then, becomes the contained, the enveloped, the held.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“Why do you haunt me? You, like a tattoo on my tongue, like the bay leaf at the bottom of every pan. You who sprawled out beside me and sang my horoscope to a Schubert symphony, something about travel and money again, and we lay there, both of our breaths bad, both of our underwear dangling elastic, and then you turned toward me with a gaze like two matches, putting the horoscope aside, you traced my buried ribs with your index finger, lingered at my collarbone, admiring it as one might a flying buttress, murmuring: Nice clavicle. And me, too new at it and scared, not knowing what to say, whispering: You should see my ten-speed.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“Later on in life you will learn that writers are merely open, helpless texts with no real understanding of what they have written and therefore must half-believe anything and everything that is said of them.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“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")”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“Tell him not to smoke in your apartment. Tell him to get out. At first he protests. But slowly, slowly, he leaves, pulling up the collar on his expensive beige raincoat, like an old and haggard Robert Culp. Slam the door like Bette Davis. Love drains from 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

“You reach a point,” she wrote me once, “where you cannot cry anymore, and you look around you at people you know, at people your own age, and they’re not crying either. Something has been taken. And they are emptier. And they are grateful.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“I am stealing more and more money. I keep it in my top drawer beneath my underwear, along with my diaphragm and lipstick and switchblade—these are things a woman needs”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“1976. The Bicentennial. In the laundromat, you want for the time on your coins to run out. Through the porthole of the dryer, you watch your bedeviled towels and sheets leap and fall. The radio station piped in from the ceiling plays slow, sad Motown; it encircles you with the desperate hopefulness of a boy at a dance, and it makes you cry. When you get back to your apartment, dump everything on your bed. Your mother is knitting crookedly: red, white, and blue. Kiss her hello. Say: "Sure was warm in the place." She will seem not to hear you.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“On the night you finally tell him, take him out to dinner. Translate the entrees for him. When you are home, lying in bed together, tell him that you are going to leave. He will look panicked, but not surprised. Perhaps he will say, Look, I don't care who else you're seeing or anything: what is your reason?

Do not attempt to bandy words. Tell him you do not love him anymore. It will make him cry, rivulets wending their way into his ears. You will start to feel sick. He will say something like: Well, you lose some, you lose some. You are supposed to laugh. Ex-hale. Blow your nose. Flick off the light. Have a sense of humor, he will whisper into the black. Have a heart.

Make him breakfast. He will want to know where you will go. Reply: To the actor. Or: To the hunchbacks. He will not eat your break-fast. He will glare at it, stir it around the plate with a fork, and then hurl it against the wall.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“Music ultimately left him unstirred. Like a god irritated with his own tinkerings. Despite his talent, or perhaps because of it, he heard only the machinery, the clanking and spitting. He felt nothing. No compassion.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“Learn that you have a way of knowing each other which somehow slips out and beyond the ways you have of not knowing each other at all.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“Someday, like everybody, this man you truly love like no other is going to die. No matter how much you love him, you cannot save him. No matter how much you love: nothing, no one, lasts.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“There are lots of people in this world, Moss, but you can’t be in love with them all.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“You confuse lovers, mix up who had what scar, what car, what mother.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help