3
" 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 , Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
13
" Things, I know, stiffen and shift in memory, become what they never were before. As when an army takes over a country. Or a summer yard goes scarlet with fall and its venous leaves. One summons the years of the past largely by witchcraft-a whore's arts, collage and brew, eye of newt, heart of horse. Still, the house of my childhood is etched in my memory like the shape of the mind itself: a house-shaped mind-why not? It was this particular mind out of which I ventured-for any wild danger or sentimental stance or lunge at something faraway. But it housed every seedling act. I floated above it, but close, like a figure in a Chagall. "
― Lorrie Moore , Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
16
" She was, probably, the nicest person I had ever known. Yet in the years following, for myself, I abandoned even believing in niceness or being nice. I could scarcely control myself, wherever I was, from telling everyone, anyone, what I thought of them. It was an urge, a compulsion, my tongue bitten a futile blue. That's a ridiculous thing to say. You must have been spoiled as a child. I couldn't stop myself. You are ungenerous. You parcel yourself out like an expensive spice. You idealize things; you're a narcissist. You seek only to etch impressions of yourself on someone else's face. It's a form of cheapness. You're cheap. You're patronizing. You're a fascist. You're a bully. I've always hated bullies. You look awful in that color. It was as if I'd been hit on the head. "
― Lorrie Moore , Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
18
" People alone, trapped, country people, all looked at the sky, I knew. It was the way out somehow, that sky, but it was also the steady, changeless witness to the after and before one's decisions—it witnessed all the deaths that took people away to other worlds—and so people had a tendency to talk to it. [...] I wondered whether I would ever be in love with a boy. Would I? Why not? Why not? Right then and there I vowed and dared and bet that sky and the trees that I would. [...] It would be a boy very far away—and I would go there someday and find him. He would just be there. And I would love him. And he would love me. And we would simply be there together, loving like that, in that place, wherever it was. I had a whole life ahead. I had patience and faith and a headful o songs. "
― Lorrie Moore , Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?