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I Often Think That At The Center Of Me Is A Voice That At Last Did Split, A House In My Heart So Invaded With Other People And Their Speech, Friends I Believed I Was Devoted To, People Whose Lives I Can Simply Guess At Now, That It Gives Me The Impression I Am Simply A Collection Of Them, That They All Existed For Themselves, But Had Inadvertently Formed Me, Then Vanished. But, What: Should I Have Been Expected To Create My Own Self, Out Of Nothing, Out Of Thin, Thin Air And Alone?

-Lorrie Moore

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I Often Think That

Lorrie Moore

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I Often Think That At The Center Of Me Is A Voice That At Last Did Split, A House In My Heart So Invaded With Other People And Their Speech, Friends I Believed I Was Devoted To, People Whose Lives I Can Simply Guess At Now, That It Gives Me The Impression I Am Simply A Collection Of Them, That They All Existed For Themselves, But Had Inadvertently Formed Me, Then Vanished. But, What: Should I Have Been Expected To Create My Own Self, Out Of Nothing, Out Of Thin, Thin Air And Alone?

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Sinking Feeling

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This Was My Modest Dream Come True: Unambitious Flight. The Kind That Never Even Got High Enough For A View.

It Was Part Of Being A Girl In The '60s That You Were Creative.

I Don't Have A Love Life. I Have A Like Life.

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Perhaps We Had At Last Reached That Stage Of Intimacy That Destroys Intimacy.

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Who Your Friends Are

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I've Never Been To A Dinner Party Where Everyone At The Dinner Table Didn't Say Something Funny.

Every Arrangement In Life Carried With It The Sadness, The Sentimental Shadow, Of Its Not Being Something Else, But Only Itself.

Editing Is Just Ongoing. I Don't Count Drafts, Or Know What Would Fully Constitute A Draft. But I Try To Fix As I Go. And There's Always More To Fix.

The Compulsion To Read And Write - And It Seems To Me It Should Be, Even Must Be, A Compulsion - Is A Bit Of Mental Wiring The Species Has Selected, Over Time, In Order, As The Life Span Increases, To Keep Us Interested In Ourselves.

For Love To Last, You Had To Have Illusions Or Have No Illusions At All. But You Had To Stick To One Or The Other. It Was The Switching Back And Forth That Endangered Things.

Love Relationship

I Wished For Eternal And Intriguing Muteness. I Would Be The Mysterious Dumb Girl, The Enigmatic Elf. The Human Voice No Longer Interested Me.

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A Dark Matter Is A Page-turning Thriller Of Every Sort: Psychological, Sociological, Epistemological . Plus, It's Really Scary.

But Family Life Sometimes Had A Vortex, Like Weather. It Could Be Like A Tornado In A Quiet Zigzag: Get Close Enough And You Might See Within It A Spinning Eighteen-wheeler And A Woman.

Pleasantness Was The Machismo Of The Midwest. There Was Something Athletic About It. You Flexed Your Face Into A Smile And Let It Hover There Like The Dare Of A Cat.

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.

We Were In Dialogue That Was About Something Other Than What We Were Saying.

I Had Never Feared Insomnia Before--like Prison, Wouldn't It Just Give You More Time To Read?

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No Matter That You Anticipate A Thing; You Get So Used To It As Part Of The Future That Its Actuality, Its Arrival, Its Force And Presence, Startles You, Takes You By Surprise, As Would A Ghost Suddenly Appearing In The Room Wearing Familiar Perfume And Boots.

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