It is like having a book out from the library.
It is like constantly having a book out from the library.
[Her life] had taken on the shape of a terrible mistake. She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hair-brush and told, "There you go." She'd stood there for years, blinking and befuddled, brushing the can with the brush.
Lorrie MooreThe situation was not easy for her, they knew. Once, at the start of last semester, she had skipped into her lecture hall singing "Getting to Know You" - both verses. At the request of the dean the chairman had called her into his office, but did not ask her for an explanation, not really. He asked her how she was and then smiled in an avuncular way. She said, "Fine," and he studied the way she said it, her front teeth catching on the inside of her lower lip. She was almost pretty, but her face showed the strain and ambition of always having been close but not quite.
Lorrie MooreNothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.
Lorrie MooreThe functional disenchantment, the sweet habit of each other, had begun to put lines around her mouth, lines that looked like quotation marks--as if everything she said had already been said before...[the cat] was accustomed to much nestling and appreciation and drips from the faucet, though sometimes she would vanish outside, and they would not see her for days, only to spy her later, in the yard, dirty and matted, chomping a vole or eating old snow.
Lorrie MooreOn-yez, where are you from, dear?' asked a black-slacked, frosted-haired woman whose skin was papery and melanomic with suntan. 'Originally.' She eyed Agnes's outfit as if it might be what in fact it was: a couple of blue things purchased in a department store in Cedar Rapids.
Where am I from?' Agnes said it softly. 'Iowa.' She had a tendency not to speak up.
Where?' the woman scowled, bewildered.
Iowa,' Agnes repeated loudly.
The woman in black touched Agnes's wrist and leaned in confidentially. She moved her mouth in a concerned and exaggerated way, like an exercise. 'No, dear,' she said. 'Here we say O-hi-o.
When she packed up to leave, she knew that she was saying goodbye to something important, which was not that bad, in a way, because it meant that at least you had said hello to it to begin with...
Lorrie MooreI 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 MooreThose are the love killers. They love you and then they kill you. They're from another planet. Supposedly.
Lorrie MooreI just don't want you to feel uncomfortable about this," he says.
Say: "Hey. I am a very cool person. I am tough." Show him your bicep.
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