I often think that at the center of me is a voice that at last did split, a house in my heart so invaded with other people and their speech, friends I believed I was devoted to, people whose lives I can simply guess at now, that it gives me the impression I am simply a collection of them, that they all existed for themselves, but had inadvertently formed me, then vanished. But, what: Should I have been expected to create my own self, out of nothing, out of thin, thin air and alone?

— Lorrie Moore

It was strange, this toxic little vein, strange to stand above it, looking down at night, in a dangerous neighborhood, as if they were in love and entitled to such adventures.

— Lorrie Moore

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.

— Lorrie Moore

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

— Lorrie Moore

I was Baptist and had always prayed, in a damp squint, for things not to happen. Sits was a Catholic, and so she prayed for things to happen, for things to come true. She prayed for love here and now. I prayed for no guns.

— Lorrie Moore

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

I would be a genius now,” Guilty has said three times already, “if only I’d memorized Shakespeare instead of Lulu.” “If only,” says Mack. Mack himself would be a genius now if only he had been born a completely different person. But what could you do? He’d read in a magazine once that geniuses were born only to women over thirty; his own mother had been twenty-nine. Damn! So fucking close!

— Lorrie Moore

I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it.

— Lorrie Moore

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.

— Lorrie Moore

Let's make our own way,' says the Mother, 'and not in this boat.

— Lorrie Moore