Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.

— Lorrie Moore

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.

— Lorrie Moore

I don't have a love life. I have a like life.' Mamie smiled. She thought how nice that might be, to be peacefully free from love...

— 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.

— Lorrie Moore

If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You didn't have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell off the bike: I was drinking my wine too quickly.

— Lorrie Moore

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

— Lorrie Moore

I looked in vain for LaRoue, my cruelty toward her now in me like a splinter, where it would sit for years in my helpless memory, the skin growing around; what else can memory do? It can do nothing; It pretends to eat the shrapnel of your acts, yet it cannot swallow or chew.

— Lorrie Moore

I mean …” Dennis was saying, looking pointedly at Have, but Have was watching the waitress approach. Oh, life, oh, sweet, forgiven for the ice … He grabbed Have’s wrist. There was always an emergency. And then there was love. And then there was another emergency. That was the sandwiching of it. Emergency. Love. Emergency. “I mean, it’s not as if you’ve been dozing off,” Dennis was saying, his voice reaching her now, high and watery. “I mean, correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but I don’t think I’ve been having this conversation alone.” He tightened his grip. “I mean, have I?

— Lorrie Moore

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.

— Lorrie Moore

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. Furthermore, you might one day wake up and find yourself teaching at a community college; there will have been nothing to warn you. Furthermore, you might say things to your students like, There is only one valid theme in literature: Life will disappoint you.

— Lorrie Moore