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A Gate at the Stairs QUOTES

A Gate at the Stairs QUOTES

1 " Anyone who's read all of Proust plus The Man withour Qualities is bound t be missing out on a few other titles. "

― Lorrie Moore , A Gate at the Stairs

2 " 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

3 " When you find out who you are, you will no longer be innocent. That will be sad for others to see. All that knowledge will show on your face and change it. But sad only for others, not for yourself. You will feel you have a kind of wisdom, very mistaken, but a mistake of some power to you and so you will sadly treasure it and grow it. "

― Lorrie Moore , A Gate at the Stairs

4 " 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 Moore , A Gate at the Stairs

5 " Don't make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time. "

― Lorrie Moore , A Gate at the Stairs

6 " Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy. "

― Lorrie Moore , A Gate at the Stairs

7 " Love is the answer, said the songs, and that's OK. It was OK, I supposed, as an answer. But no more than that. It was not a solution; it wasn't really even an answer, just a reply. "

― Lorrie Moore , A Gate at the Stairs

8 " Women now were told not to settle for second best, told that they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around. "

― Lorrie Moore , A Gate at the Stairs

9 " And though he continued never to express a single word of love for me, not in any way of his several languages, I could not take a hint. Let the hint be written across the heavens in skywriting done by several planes - I was dense. Even skywriting, well, it wasn't always certain: it might not cover the whole entire sky, or some breeze might smudge it, so who could really say for sure what it said? Even skywriting wouldn't have worked! Several years later, I would wonder why I had thought my feelings for this man were anything but a raw, thrilling, vigilant infatuation. But I still had called them love. I was in love. I had learned the Portuguese and the Arabic for love, but all for naught. "

― Lorrie Moore , A Gate at the Stairs

10 " Love is a fever," she said. "And when you come out of it you'll discover whether you've been lucky - or not. "

― Lorrie Moore , A Gate at the Stairs

11 " Things between us were dissolving like an ice cub in a glass: the smaller it got, the faster it disappeared. "

― Lorrie Moore , A Gate at the Stairs

12 " Blasts from the past were like the rooms one entered and re-entered in dreams: they would not stay nailed down. When you returned to them, they had changed - they suddenly had more space or a tilt or a door that had not been there before. New people were milling around, the floors undulated, and the sun shone newly, strangely in the windows, or through the now blasted-open ceiling, or else it shone not at all, as if having fled the sky. "

― Lorrie Moore , A Gate at the Stairs

13 " I wondered about the half-life of regret. "

― Lorrie Moore , A Gate at the Stairs

14 " You emptied the top rack of the dishwasher but not the bottom, so the clean dishes have gotten all mixed up with the dirty ones - and now you want to have sex? "

― Lorrie Moore , A Gate at the Stairs

15 " I've come to realize that life, while being everything, is also strangely not much. Except when the light shines on it a different way and then you realize it's a lot after all! "

― Lorrie Moore , A Gate at the Stairs

16 " Adults are living increasingly as children: completely in their imaginations. Reading Harry Potter while every newspaper in the country goes out of business. They know so little that is real. "

― Lorrie Moore , A Gate at the Stairs

17 " This was love, I supposed, and eventually I would come to know it. Someday it would choose me and I would come to know its spell, for long stretches and short, two times, maybe three, and then quite probably it would choose me never again. "

― Lorrie Moore , A Gate at the Stairs

18 " Life was unendurable, and yet everywhere it was endured. "

― Lorrie Moore , A Gate at the Stairs

19 " The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riveted, but in separate narratives, and so our interactions seemed weird and richly meaningless, like the characters in a Tennessee Williams play, with their bursting unimportant, but spell-bindingly mad speeches. "

― Lorrie Moore , A Gate at the Stairs

20 " 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. "

― Lorrie Moore , A Gate at the Stairs