But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless. Lorrie Moore More Quotes by Lorrie Moore More Quotes From Lorrie Moore Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy. Lorrie Moore intimacy stage lasts She was not good on the phone. She needed the face, the pattern of eyes, nose, trembling mouth... People talking were meant to look at a face, the disastrous cupcake of it, the hide-and-seek of the heart dashing across. With a phone, you said words, but you never watched them go in. You saw them off at the airport but never knew whether there was anyone there to greet them when they got off the plane. Lorrie Moore phones eye heart 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 sadness coffee worry Basically, I realized I was living in that awful stage of life between twenty-six to and thirty-seven known as stupidity. It's when you don't know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don't even have a philosophy about all the things you don't know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight. Lorrie Moore eight stupidity philosophy That is what is wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls - we all have a bit of that - but that they insist every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or value of gesture. The emotional necessity. For them, it is all honesty before kindness, truth before art. Love is art, not truth. It's like painting scenery. Lorrie Moore honesty kindness art No matter what terror the earth could produce - winds, 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. Lorrie Moore flower sea wind If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write. Lorrie Moore creating records writing (Such a life)engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart. Lorrie Moore despair heart country She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime. Lorrie Moore crime loneliness littles 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 light water blood 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 creating writing years I love plays. Even bad ones. I like the fact that actual live, breathing people are standing before you in tense situations that you are not personally responsible for. Lorrie Moore breathing play people Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation. Lorrie Moore punctuation real writing You are unhappy because you believe in such a thing as happy. Lorrie Moore unhappy believe Make a list of all the lovers you've ever had. Warren Lasher Ed "Rubberhead" Catapano Charles Deats or Keats Alfonse Tuck it in your pocket. Leave it lying around, conspicuously. Somehow you lose it. Make "mislaid" jokes to yourself. Make another list. Lorrie Moore pockets lists lying Twenty-year-olds have a kind of emotional idealism about relationships and about the world that enables them to say, 'No, you lied to me. Goodbye.' When they see wickedness, they walk away. Lorrie Moore emotional goodbye years The detachment of the artist is kind of creepy. It's kind of rude, and yet really it's where art comes from. It's not the same as courage. It's closer to bad manners than to courage. If you're going to be a writer, you basically have to say, 'this is just who I am'. There's a certain indefensibility about it. It's not about loving your community and taking care of it — you're not attached to the chamber of commerce. It's a little unsafe. You have to be willing to have only four friends, not 11. Lorrie Moore loving-you who-i-am art All the way out I listen to the car AM radio, bad lyrics of trailer park love, gin and tonic love, strobe light love, lost and found love, lost and found and lost love, lost and lost and lost love—some people were having no luck at all. The DJ sounds quick and smooth and after-shaved, the rest of the world a mess by comparison. Lorrie Moore lost-love light people People will do anything, anything, for a really nice laugh. Lorrie Moore nice laughing people Start dating someone who is funny, someone who has what in high school you called a "really great sense of humor" and what now your creative writing class calls "self-contempt giving rise to comic form." Write down all of his jokes, but don't tell him you are doing this. Make up anagrams of his old girlfriend's name and name all of your socially handicapped characters with them. Tell him his old girlfriend is in all of your stories and then watch how funny he can be, see what a really great sense of humor he can have. Lorrie Moore girlfriend writing school
