Anagrams Quotes

“All the world's a stage we're going through.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“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

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

“I missed him. Love, I realized, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it. ”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“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.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“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.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“Life is sad. Here is someone.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“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”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“The problem with a beautiful woman is that she makes everyone around her feel hopelessly masculine, which if you’re already male to begin with poses no particular problem. But if you’re anyone else, your whole sexual identity gets dragged into the principal’s office: “So what’s this I hear about you prancing around, masquerading as a woman?” You are answerless. You are sitting on your hands. You are praying for your breasts to grow, your hair to perk up.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“I want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“Perhaps she drives men away. Perhaps, without even being able to help herself, she just puts men into her ill-tempered car and drives them off: to quarries, dumps, small anonymous bodies of water.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“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.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“Things, however, rarely happened the way you understood them. Mostly they just sort of drove up alongside what you thought was the case and then moved randomly down some other way.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“Sometimes as I’m drifting toward sleep, in the beginnings of that dissolution, I wonder where I am, when this is, and realize that at these moments I could be anywhere, anytime, for all I know: eight and napping in the trailer, my broken arm in a cast, or thirteen at night clutching a pillow to my neck, or twenty in the arms of my boyfriend, or twenty-seven in the arms of my husband, or thirty-three next to my imaginary daughter; at every place in the whole spinning shape that is my life, when I am falling asleep, I am the same person, the identical awareness, the same fuzzball of mind, the same muck of nerves, all along the line. I forage through my life and everywhere—there, there, and there—it is only me in it, the very same me, the same harmless lump, the same soggy weirdo, the same sleeping, breathing bun.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“I watched my friend Eleanor give birth," she said. "Once you've seen a child born, you realize a baby's not much more than a reconstituted ham and cheese sandwich. Just a little anagram of you and what you've been eating for nine months.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“The ants are my friends- they're blowing in the wind”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“This is why a woman makes things up: Because when she dies, those lives she never got to are all going down with her. All those possibilities will just site there like a bunch of school kids with their hands raised and uncalled on--each knowing, really knowing, the answer.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“You have a choice," she told the class. "The whorish emptiness of lies or the straightlaced horrors of truth.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“When I was little, I didn’t understand that you could change a few sounds in a name or a phrase and have it mean something entirely different. When I told teachers my name was Benna and they said, “Donna who?” I would say, “Donna Gilbert.” I thought close was good enough, that sloppiness was generally built into the language. I thought Bing Crosby and Bill Crosby were the same person. That Buddy Holly and Billie Holiday were the same person. That Leon Trotsky and Leo Tolstoy were the same person. It was a shock for me quite late in life to discover that Jean Cocteau and Jacques Cousteau were not even related. Meaning, if it existed at all, was unstable and could not survive the slightest reshuffling of letters. One gust of wind and Santa became Satan. A slip of the pen and pears turned into pearls. A little interior decorating and the world became her twold, an ungrammatical and unkind assessment of an aging aunt in a singles bar. Add a d to poor, you got droop. It was that way in biology, too. Add a chromosome, get a criminal. Subtract one, get an idiot or a chipmunk. That was the way with things.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“All of life seems to me a strange dream about losing things you never had to begin with. About trying to find your glasses when you can't see because you don't have your glasses on.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“If I could not be anchored and profound, I would try, at least, to be kind.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“Life is sad, I thought. Here is someone.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“I realized that life was too short for anyone honestly and thoroughly to outgrow anything, but it was clear that some people were making more of an effort than others.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“It's not that men fear intimacy,' I said to Eleanor. 'It's that they're hypochondriacs of intimacy: They always think they have it when they don't. Gerard thinks we're very close but half the time he's talking to me like he met me forty-five minutes ago, telling me things about himself I've known for years, and asking me questions about myself that he should know the answers to already. Last night he asked me what my middle name was. God, I can't talk about it.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“In the Dictionary 'lumpy jaw' comes just before 'lunacy,' but in life there are no such clues. Suddenly, for no reason, you might start to dribble from the mouth, to howl peevishly at the moon. You might start quoting your mother, out loud and with conviction. You might lose your friends to the most uninspired of deaths. You might one day wake up and find yourself teaching at a community college; there will have been nothing to warn you. You might say things to your students like, There is only one valid theme in literature: Life will disappoint you.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“No, we’re not getting married,” I told my mother on the phone when she asked. “He’s going to California and I’m staying here.” Usually she doesn't phone. Usually she just does things like send me notes with histrionic scrawlings that read, “Well, you know, I can’t use these,” and along with the notes she encloses coupons for Kotex or Midol.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“It's two against one out here; we just keep taking turns.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“That was also back in the days when I thought the ice-cream man lived in his truck”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“More and more he was becoming convinced that it was only through children that one could connect with anything anymore, that in this life it was only through children that one came home, became a home, that one was no longer a visitor.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams