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“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

“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

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

—Lorrie Moore

“Her heart was big and bursting. Though her brain was drying and subdividing like a cauliflower.”

—Lorrie Moore, “Two Boys” from Like Life (1990)

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

—Lorrie Moore, (Anagrams)

“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

“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

“You spend too much time slouched and demoralized. Your boyfriend suggests bicycling. Your roommate suggests a new boyfriend. You are said to be self-mutilating and losing weight, but you continue writing. The only happiness you have is writing something new, in the middle of the night, armpits damp, heart pounding, something no one has yet seen. You have only those brief, fragile, untested moments of exhilaration when you know: you are a genius. Understand what you must do. Switch majors. The kids in your nursery project will be disappointed, but you have a calling, an urge, a delusion, an unfortunate habit. You have, as your mother would say, fallen in with a bad crowd.”

—Lorrie Moore, “How to Become a Writer”

“I'm supposed to wait around for someone special, while every other girl in this town gets to have a life?" It was true. Men could be with whomever they pleased. But women had to date better, kinder, richer, and bright, bright, bright, or else people got embarrassed..."I'm a very average person," she said desperately, somehow detecting that Charlotte already knew that, knew the deep, dark, wildly obvious secret of that, and how it made Sidra slightly pathetic, unseemingly- inferior, when you got right down to it.”

—Lorrie Moore, “Willing” (from The Birds of America)

“Love was something your spine memorized.”

—Anagrams, Lorrie Moore

“Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.”

—Lorrie Moore

“Suppose you threw a love affair and nobody came.”

—Lorrie Moore; “How to Become a Writer Or, Have You Earned This Cliche?” from Self-Help

“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.”

—Anagrams by Lorrie Moore
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