1
The night before, a whole day could have shape and design. But when it was upon you, it could vanish tragically to air.Lorrie Moore
2
Marriage, she felt, was a fine arrangement generally, except that one never got it generally. One got it very, very specifically.Lorrie Moore
3
Through college she had been a feminist–basically: she shaved her legs, but just not often enough, she liked to say.Lorrie Moore
4
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
5
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
6
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
7
How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveler’s mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye’s instructions, is necessarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. All that unsayable life! That’s where the narrator comes in. The narrator comes with her kisses and mimicry and tidying up. The narrator comes and makes a slow, fake song of the mouth’s eager devastation.Lorrie Moore
8
Pulling through is what people do around here. There is a kind of bravery in their lives that isn’t bravery at all. It is automatic, unflinching, a mix of man and machine, consuming and unquestionable obligation meeting illness move for move in a giant even-steven game of chess — an unending round of something that looks like shadowboxing, though between love and death, which is the shadow? “Everyone admires us for our courage, ” says one man. “They have no idea what they’re talking about.”“ Courage requires options, ” the man adds.“ There are options, ” says a woman with a thick suede headband. “You could give up. You could fall apart.”“ No you can’t. Nobody does. I’ve never seen it, ” says the man. “Well, not really fall apart.Lorrie Moore
9
I would be a genius now, ” Quilty 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
10
Let's make our own way, ' says the Mother, 'and not in this boat.Lorrie Moore