I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home Quotes

“When I go back to the places of the past, nothing is there anymore, as if I have made the whole thing up. It is as if life were just a dream placed in the window to cool, like a pie, then stolen.”
― Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

“Everyone at some point in their lives should have a long great love affair with a magnificent lunatic.”
― Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

“Suffering then vanishing. Did everyone understand that’s what they had signed up for, or really just not signed up at all but been drafted? Life was soldiering. Death was disappearance. Death sure had the power move. It had the black cape, the fine print, and the magic tricks.”
― Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

“And yet the deprivation of her intimacy had made a small dent in his heart, and in his breathing, and in the hard candy of his eyes. The thought of her was everywhere but nowhere—an omniscient narrator.”
― Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

“... I cannot see life, what it's supposed to be: I'm stumped and mystified and frozen in place. Yet other times, I realize, regardless, there's a lot to be thankful for. It's perplexing! How's a soul to know?”
― Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

“Oblivion’s where all learning goes anyways, sometimes the very next day.”
― Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

“Do I jar you?" he asks with his sly charm.
"No," I say. “I am braced at every turn for disenchantment.”
"Well that might be just a little too bad,” he says.”
― Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

“But I traffic a little in ‘conspiracy theories’ as we used to understand them, ones that put groups and systems back into the situations where individuals were taking the rap.”
― Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

“baseball is really the game that tells you what life is going to be: fastballs, errors, wild pitching, clutch hits, strike-outs, not getting to first base, things coming in from left field. Near misses. And that’s just the romance part.”
― Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

“Summoned by the head nod of a priest who never stopped smiling in a gentle, divine, ace-up-his-sleeve way, Finn now stood mechanically and went to the front of the church. He cleared his throat as if he were in a school play. At least there was no PowerPoint. From the front of the sanctuary he read some psalm or other that sounded like an unconsoling battle cry. Yet just the doing of something, anything, ceremonial in nature mildly soothed him.

Then Finn closed the good book. He spoke of brotherhood, its failings and its tendernesses. He spoke of how Max had been arbitrarily ostracized and taunted and shoved around as a boy, and how Finn, three years younger, had watched it from a distant corner of a hallway or the school yard, in fear and embarrassment, and pretended he didn’t even know Max. Finn, a coward, had kept his gaze down, receded, turned his back on Max repeatedly. Perhaps to spare Max the humiliation of knowing his little brother could see all this? But no: it was Finn’s own craven vulnerability, shameful shame. He was in countless ways unworthy of Max and his beautiful stoicism. Max’s self-designed cool life management system was unpatentable. Max’s devotion to the whole enterprise of living even when it didn’t meet him halfway. Max’s refusal to whine. Max’s bursts of compassion for others when he should have, could have, saved all his reserves of compassion for himself. Max suffered terribly but calmly and with complicated knowledge. He was a beautiful brother and although perhaps there were many things the two of them should have said and didn’t, should have done but didn’t, probably that was the case between all people. He had not been at Max’s deathbed. And yet he felt in a way that he had been. He had felt Max depart at his very moment of departure. The mind-meld of brothers had kept them connected. Sometimes when people died it was the vanishing that was so hard. But Max had not really vanished. That would be impossible. There was a growing slur in Finn’s words as if he were drunk or deaf or having a mild stroke. He looked out at the congregation and saw some worried faces. He knew then that he sounded insane to absolutely everyone.”
― Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

“I need the preacher to stop by here and conversate a little. I need him to say daft and holy things and fix his face into a compassionate mask. He will be tedious and lulling and the rhythm of my breaths will be returned to steadiness. He will seek to brighten and disperse the shadows in my heart and his attempts will amuse me and summon admiration though not much else. I have no confession plans. Still, I remain vainly interested in heaven.

Yours down here still.
Eliz.”
― Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

“Everyone was always a little maddened by love because love was either hesitant or overpowering. It was never properly calibrated. It was an aggravation. It was not meticulously directed, which is perhaps why she had strayed.”
― Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

“You were born, he felt, with all emotions already inside. Eventually you would experience each of them.”
― Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

“God has gone horseback riding,” I say, “and we are left behind to tend to one another.”
― Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

“This is life! It’s not fucking perfect. It’s not even all that great. But it is the only living part you’ve got and yes it’s a mixed bag!”
― Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

“Which is how I figured out that I could fit into this bed here. I did some fast mental work with parallelograms.”
― Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

“I've become. An object of dismay. I guess.”
― Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

“He had never been good at connecting dots—sad fact but most facts were.”
― Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

“Dear Sister, the moon has roved away in the sky and I don’t even know what the Pleiades are but at last I can sit alone in the dark by this lamp, my truest self, day’s end toasted to the perfect moment and speak to you.

Nothing in the world was ever truly over.”
― Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

“It seemed no way to live and no way to die. Was this the best civilization had to offer right now?”
― Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

“give them their rhetorical safe spaces because this is the school shooting generation, and they don’t have actual safe spaces, not even movie theaters, so they need rhetorical ones, extra courtesies, new gentle and acknowledging terms.”
― Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

“People talk about ‘conspiracy theories’—Pizzagate and bullshit like that. Those aren’t conspiracy theories. Those are psychotic mirages.”
― Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home