They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.
Lorrie MooreRead
But I believed in starting over. There was finally, I knew, only rupture and hurt and falling short between all persons, but, Shirley, the best revenge was to turn your life into a small gathering of miracles. If I could not be anchored and profound, I would try, at least, to be kind.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of kindness and finding beauty in life's small moments despite past pain.
In this quote, Lorrie Moore reflects on the challenges and emotional pain inherent in human relationships. She suggests that while one may experience rupture and hurt, the best way to cope with these difficulties is to focus on creating a life filled with small miracles and acts of kindness. It highlights the idea that even when one cannot be deeply anchored in life's complexities, striving to be kind can lead to a meaningful existence.
Themes
KindnessMiraclesStarting OverRelationshipsHealing
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech about overcoming adversity, you could use this quote to emphasize the power of kindness.
More from Lorrie Moore
All quotes →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.
Lorrie MooreRead
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
Similar quotes
Unlike the Tea Party, who see themselves as the customers of government, people in the Occupy Wall Street movement understand that we are the government. Stated most simply, we are trying to run a 21st-century society on a 13th-century economic operating system. It just doesn't work.
Douglas RushkoffRead
When I sleep every night, what am I called or not called? And when I wake, who am I if I was not I while I slept?
Pablo NerudaRead
There is no witness so terrible, no accuser so powerful as conscience which dwells within us.
SophoclesRead
As Freud has shown, blunders are not the merest chance. They are the result of suppressed desires and conflicts. They are ripples on the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs. And these may be very deep - as deep as the soul itself. The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny.
Joseph CampbellRead
Monarchy is an outrage which even the blind of an entire people cannot justify... all men hold from nature the secret mission to destroy wherever it my be found. No man can reign innocently. The folly is too evident. Every king is a rebel and a usurper. Do kings themselves treat otherwise those who seek to usurp their authority?
Louis Antoine De Saint-JustRead
Imagine a civilisation that's way in advance of us wants to communicate with us, and assist us in our development. The information we provide to them must reflect our highest aspirations and ideals, and not just be some crazy person's bizarre politics or religion.
Paul DaviesRead