A short story is a love affair

“A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.”
― Lorrie Moore

“All the world's a stage we're going through.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.”
― Lorrie Moore, Like Life

“One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.”
― Lorrie Moore, Like Life

“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, Self-Help

“I count too heavily on birthdays, though I know I shouldn't. Inevitably I begin to assess my life by them, figure out how I'm doing by how many people remember; it's like the old fantasy of attending your own funeral: You get to see who your friends are, get to see who shows up. ”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“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 Moore, Birds of America

“They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“I missed him. Love, I realized, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“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, Like Life

“Guns, she was reminded then, were not for girls. They were for boys. They were invented by boys. They were invented by boys who had never gotten over their disappointment that accompanying their own orgasm there wasn't a big boom sound.”
― Lorrie Moore, Like Life

“Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“You are unhappy because you believe in such a thing as happy.”
― Lorrie Moore

“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, Self-Help

“Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself.”
― Lorrie Moore, Birds of America

“Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.”
― Lorrie Moore

“The thing to remember about love affairs," says Simone, "is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney."
...

We have raccoons sometimes in our chimney," explains Simone.
And once we tried to smoke them out. We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back. Instead, they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames and running madly around until they dropped dead." Simone swallows some wine. "Love affairs are like that," she says. "They are all like that.”
― 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, Like Life

“I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“It was like the classic scene in the movies where one lover is on the train and one is on the platform and the train starts to pull away, and the lover on the platform begins to trot along and then jog and then sprint and then gives up altogether as the train speeds irrevocably off. Except in this case I was all the parts: I was the lover on the platform, I was the lover on the train. And I was also the train.”
― Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs

“Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.”
― Lorrie Moore

“I had never feared insomnia before--like prison, wouldn't it just give you more time to read?”
― Lorrie Moore

“But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.”
― Lorrie Moore

“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, Anagrams

“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, Birds of America

“Decide that you like college life. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“It is like having a book out from the library.
It is like constantly having a book out from the library.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“She was afraid, and the afraid, she realized, sought opportunities for bravery in love.”
― Lorrie Moore, Like Life

“Cold men destroy women,” my mother wrote me years later. “They woo them with something personable that they bring out for show, something annexed to their souls like a fake greenhouse, lead you in, and you think you see life and vitality and sun and greenness, and then when you love them, they lead you out into their real soul, a drafty, cavernous, empty ballroom, inexorably arched and vaulted and mocking you with its echoes—you hear all you have sacrificed, all you have given, landing with a loud clunk. They lock the greenhouse and you are as tiny as a figure in an architect’s drawing, a faceless splotch, a blur of stick limbs abandoned in some voluminous desert of stone.”
― Lorrie Moore

“There were moments bristling with deadness, when she looked out at her life and went, "What?" Or worse, feeling interrupted and tired, "Wha—?”
― Lorrie Moore, Birds of America