The passive voice could always be used to obscure blame.

— Lorrie Moore

The turkeys I eat are raised on farms. They're different. They've signed on the dotted line.

— Lorrie Moore

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

— Lorrie Moore

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

— Lorrie Moore

This is why a woman makes things up: Because when she dies, those lives she never got to are all going down with her. All those possibilities will just site there like a bunch of school kids with their hands raised and uncalled on--each knowing, really knowing, the answer.

— Lorrie Moore

This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she'd noticed a lot in people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. But they recycled their newspapers!

— Lorrie Moore

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. Have 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.

— Lorrie Moore

Through college, she had been a feminist—basically: she shaved her legs, but just not often enough, she liked to say.

— Lorrie Moore

Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.

— Lorrie Moore

What makes humans human is precisely that they do not know the future. That is why they do the fateful and amusing things they do: who can say how anything will turn out? Therein lies the only hope for redemption, discovery, and-let’s be frank—fun, fun, fun! There might be things people will get away with. And not just motel towels. There might be great illicit loves, enduring joy, faith-shaking accidents with farm machinery. But you have to not know in order to see what stories your life’s efforts bring you. The mystery is all.

— Lorrie Moore