A Gate at the Stairs Quotes

“It was like the classic scene in the movies where one lover is on the train and one is on the platform and the train starts to pull away, and the lover on the platform begins to trot along and then jog and then sprint and then gives up altogether as the train speeds irrevocably off. Except in this case I was all the parts: I was the lover on the platform, I was the lover on the train. And I was also the train.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“I tried not to think about my life. I did not have any good solid plans for it long-term - no bad plans either, no plans at all - and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my friends (marriage, children, law school), sometimes shamed me. Other times in my mind I defended such a condition as morally and intellectually superior - my life was open and ready and free - but that did not make it less lonely.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“When you find out who you are, you will no longer be innocent. That will be sad for others to see. All that knowledge will show on your face and change it. But sad only for others, not for yourself. You will feel you have a kind of wisdom, very mistaken, but a mistake of some power to you and so you will sadly treasure it and grow it.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“Don't make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy. ”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“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.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“Women now were told not to settle for second best, told that they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“Things between us were dissolving like an ice cub in a glass: the smaller it got, the faster it disappeared. ”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“Love is a fever," she said. "And when you come out of it you'll discover whether you've been lucky - or not.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“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.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“Adults are living increasingly as children: completely in their imaginations. Reading Harry Potter while every newspaper in the country goes out of business. They know so little that is real.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“You emptied the top rack of the dishwasher but not the bottom, so the clean dishes have gotten all mixed up with the dirty ones - and now you want to have sex?”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“And though he continued never to express a single word of love for me, not in any way of his several languages, I could not take a hint. Let the hint be written across the heavens in skywriting done by several planes - I was dense. Even skywriting, well, it wasn't always certain: it might not cover the whole entire sky, or some breeze might smudge it, so who could really say for sure what it said? Even skywriting wouldn't have worked! Several years later, I would wonder why I had thought my feelings for this man were anything but a raw, thrilling, vigilant infatuation. But I still had called them love. I was in love. I had learned the Portuguese and the Arabic for love, but all for naught.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“Life was unendurable, and yet everywhere it was endured.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“I wondered about the half-life of regret.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“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!”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“This was love, I supposed, and eventually I would come to know it. Someday it would choose me and I would come to know its spell, for long stretches and short, two times, maybe three, and then quite probably it would choose me never again.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riveted, but in separate narratives, and so our interactions seemed weird and richly meaningless, like the characters in a Tennessee Williams play, with their bursting unimportant, but spell-bindingly mad speeches. ”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“But family life sometimes had a vortex, like weather. It could be like a tornado in a quiet zigzag: get close enough and you might see within it a spinning eighteen-wheeler and a woman.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“I said nothing. If she wasn't careful, everyone would rush out of her life, life out of a burning building.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“This was my modest dream come true: unambitious flight. The kind that never even got high enough for a view.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“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.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“A match made in heaven - where do you get those? That's what I want to know!”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“Yes," she said. "'I Been Working on the Railroad.'There's just two things I'm worried about with that: the grammar and the use of slave labor.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“They were in performance. They were performing their marriage at me.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“Amber was past tense. We were covering her inanimate face in the white sheet of was. ”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“But I was not especially skilled at minding children for long spells; I grew bored, perhaps like my own mother. After I spent too much time playing their games, my mind grew peckish and longed to lose itself in some book I had in my backpack. I was ever hopeful of early bedtimes and long naps.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“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.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“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.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs