RELIGION

'Religion, I could now see, without a single college course helping me out, was designed for those enduring the death of their sweet children. And when children grew stronger and died less, and were in fact less sweet, religion faded away. When children began to sweeten and die again it returned.'

Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs, p.296.

MARRIAGE

'I would never take a man's name. I knew that, in the deepest part of me, even though I suspected that the women who did take their husbands' names understood something about marriage that I didn't.'

Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs, p.244.

WOMEN

'Women now were told not to settle for second best, told they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around. They were like the poor that way, perhaps. What sense did anything they were being told possibly make given the scarcity of their world?'

Lorrie Moore, The Gate at the Stairs, p.81.

BRILLIANT

'"Awesome," I said, in a peculiar way, I knew, our generation had of finding that everything either 'sucked' or was 'awesome.' We used awesome the way that the British used brilliant: for anything at all. Perhaps, as with the British, it was a kind of antidepressant: inflated rhetoric to keep the sorry truth at bay.'

Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs, p.76.

CHILDHOOD

'...too often when we compared stories from our childhood, they didn't match. I would speak of a trip or a meal or a visit from a cousin and of something that had happened during it, and Robert would look at me as if I were speaking of the adventures of some Albanian rock band. So I stayed quiet with him. It is something that people who have been children together can effortlessly do. It is sometimes preferable to the talk, which is also effortless.'

Lorrie Moore, A Gate at the Stairs, p.61.

PEOPLE

'Staring out through the windshield, off into the horizon, 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 - winds, 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.'

Lorrie Moore, 'Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People' in Birds of America, p.35.