Lorrie Moore

"I don't sit down to write a funny story. Every single thing I sit down to write is meant to be sad."

"You know, I'm just a very boring, not very funny person in person. I don't feel pressured to be otherwise."

"I've never been to a dinner party where everyone at the dinner table didn't say something funny."

"When I was in graduate school, I had a teacher who said to me, 'Women writers should marry somebody who thinks writing is cute. Because if they really realised what writing was, they would run a mile."

"Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension."

"A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film."

"“This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.”"

"[T]he normal and the everyday are often amazingly unstoppable, and what is unimaginable is the cessation of them. The world is resilient, and, no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want to return to their lives and get on with them. A veneer of civilization descends quickly, like a shining rain. Dust is settled."

"Divorce, she could see, would be like marriage - a power grab, as in who would be the dog, and who would be the owner of the dog."

"I had one elegantly folded cookie—a short paper nerve baked in an ear."

"This was what Dennis had been doing lately: granting everyone permission to feel the way they were going to feel regardless. It was the books. Dennis’s relationship to his own feelings had become tender, curatorial. Dismantling. Entomological. Mave couldn’t be like that. She treated her emotional life the way she treated her car: She let it go, let it tough it out. To friends she said things like “I know you’re thinking this looks like a ’79, but it’s really an ’87.” She finally didn’t care to understand all that much about her emotional life; she just went ahead and did it. The point, she thought, was to attend the meager theater of it, quietly, and not stand up in the middle and shout, “Oh, my God, you can see the crew backstage!” There was a point at which the study of something became a frightening and naive thing."

"The passive voice could always be used to obscure blame."

"But there was in the air that kind of distortion that bent you a little; it caused your usual self to grow slippery, to wander off and shop, to get blurry, bleed, bevel with possibility."

"I nodded, trying to imagine the very particular sadness of a vanished childhood yogurt now found only in France. It was a very special sort of sadness, individual, and in its inability to induce sympathy, in its tuneless spark, it bypassed poetry and entered science."

"Later I would come to believe that erotic ties were all a spell, a temporary psychosis, even a kind of violence, or at least they coexisted with these states. I noted that criminals as well as the insane tended to give off a palpable, vibrating allure, a kind of animal magnetism that kept them loved by someone. How else could they survive at all? Someone had to hide them from the authorities! Hence the necessity and prevalence of sex appeal for people who were wild and on the edge."

"Abby began to think that all the beauty and ugliness and turbulence one found scattered through nature, one could also find in people themselves, all collected there, all together in a single place. No matter what terror or loveliness the earth could produce- wind, seas- a person could produce the same, lived with the same, lived with all that mixed-up nature swirling inside, every bit. There was nothing as complex in the world- no flower or stone- as a single hello from a human being."

"He will talk about what "some other people said," and what he and "some other people did," and when he never specifically mentions women it will be like the Soviet news agency which never publicizes anything containing the names of the towns where the new bombs are."

"Where does love go? When something you have taped on the wall falls off, what has happened to the stickum? It has relaxed. It has accumulated an assortment of hairs and fuzzies. It has said "Fuck it" and given up. It doesn't go anywhere special, it's just gone. Energy is created, and then it is destroyed. So much for the laws of physics. So much for chemistry. So much for not so much."

"But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless."

"I don’t go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write."