Lorrie Moore

Tell me something wonderful," he said to Dane. "Tell me that we are going to die dreamfully and loved in our sleep.""You're always writing one of your plays on the phone," said Dane."I said, something wonderful. Say something about springtime.""It is sloppy and wet. It is a beast from the sea.""Ah," said Harry.

How quickly bodies came to love each other, promise themselves to each other always, without asking permission. From the mind! If only she could give up her mind, let her heart swell, inflamed, her brain stepping out for whole days, whole seasons, her work shrinking to limericks.

Oh," she said. "I wasn't going to ask, but then you never said anything about it, so I thought I'd ask.""How about you?""Not me," said Odette. She had a poem about marriage. It began, Marriage is the death you want to die, and in front of audiences she never read it with much conviction. Usually she swung her foot back and forth through the whole thing.

Marriage, she felt, was a fine arrangement generally, except that one never got it generally. One got it very, very specifically.

Abby began to think that all the beauty and ugliness and turbulence one found scattered through nature, one could also find in people themselves, all collected there, all together in a single place. No matter what terror or loveliness the earth could produce- wind, 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.

Bucks, doe _ thank God everything boils down to money, I always say.""During mating season the doe constructs a bed for herself, and then she urinates all around the outside of it. That's how she gets her mate.""So that's it," murmured Odette. "I was always peeing in the bed.

She wore a lot of gray-green corduroy. She had been under the impression that it brought out her eyes, those shy stars.

The turkeys I eat are raised on farms. They're different. They've signed on the dotted line.

So I needed to be womanised. I was losing my sheen.

The night before, a whole day could have shape and design. But when it was upon you, it could vanish tragically to air.

This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.

He will talk about what "some other people said," and what he and "some other people did," and when he never specifically mentions women it will be like the Soviet news agency which never publicizes anything containing the names of the towns where the new bombs are.

Back at home, days later, feel cranky and tired. Sit on the couch and tell him he's stupid. That you bet he doesn't know who Coriolanus is. That since you moved in you've noticed he rarely reads. He will give you a hurt, hungry-to-learn look, with his James Cagney eyes. He will try to kiss you. Turn your head. Feel suffocated. (from "How")

Where does love go? When something you have taped on the wall falls off, what has happened to the stickum? It has relaxed. It has accumulated an assortment of hairs and fuzzies. It has said "Fuck it" and given up. It doesn't go anywhere special, it's just gone. Energy is created, and then it is destroyed. So much for the laws of physics. So much for chemistry. So much for not so much.

They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.

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.

I don't sit down to write a funny story. Every single thing I sit down to write is meant to be sad.

You know, I'm just a very boring, not very funny person in person. I don't feel pressured to be otherwise.