They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.
Lorrie MooreRead
You couldn't pretend you had lost nothing... you had to begin there, not let your blood freeze over. If your heart turned away at this, it would turn away at something greater, then more and more until your heart stayed averted, immobile, your imagination redistributed away from the world and back only toward the bad maps of yourself, the sour pools of your own pulse, your own tiny, mean, and pointless wants.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of acknowledging our losses and challenges as a way to avoid becoming emotionally stagnant.
In this quote, Lorrie Moore highlights the necessity of confronting our emotional wounds and losses instead of pretending they do not exist. She warns that if we allow ourselves to turn away from pain, we risk becoming emotionally numb, narrowing our perspective and losing touch with both the world around us and our capacity for deeper desires and connections. This suggests that engaging with our grief is crucial for personal growth and maintaining a vibrant relationship with life.
Themes
LossEmotionGrowthSelf-ReflectionVulnerability
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about resilience, you could use this quote to illustrate the importance of facing our challenges.
More from Lorrie Moore
All quotes →I tried not to think about my life. I did not have any good solid plans for it long-term - no bad plans either, no plans at all - and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my friends (marriage, children, law school), sometimes shamed me. Other times in my mind I defended such a condition as morally and intellectually superior - my life was open and ready and free - but that did not make it less lonely.
Lorrie MooreRead
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 MooreRead
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.
Lorrie MooreRead
When I was in graduate school, I had a teacher who said to me, 'Women writers should marry somebody who thinks writing is cute. Because if they really realised what writing was, they would run a mile.'
Lorrie MooreRead
She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.
Lorrie MooreRead
Similar quotes
The world is not something separate from you and me; the world, society, is the relationship that we establish or seek to establish between each other. So you and I are the problem, and not the world, because the world is the projection of ourselves, and to understand the world we must understand ourselves. That world is not separate from us; we are the world, and our problems are the world's problems.
Jiddu KrishnamurtiRead
The age of Chivalry is gone. An age of Humanity has come.
Charles SumnerRead
Yeah, it's unfair that you can get judged by something you didn't do, but it's also unfair that you can inherit money that you didn't work for.
Chris RockRead
Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.
Louis D. BrandeisRead
Everything in Louisiana is about layers. There are layers of race, layers of class, layers of survival, layers of death, and layers of rebirth. To live with these layers is to be a true Louisianian. This state has a depth that is simultaneously beyond words and yet as natural as breathing. How can a place be both other-worldly and completely pedestrian is beyond me; however, Louisiana manages to do it. Louisiana is spooky that way.
Don LemonRead
Why should I care about posterity? What's posterity ever done for me?
Groucho MarxRead