Bark Quotes

“A woman had to choose her own particular unhappiness carefully. That was the only happiness in life: to choose the best unhappiness. An unwise move, good God, you could squander everything.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“Like everyone he knew, he could discern the hollowness in people’s charm only when it was directed at someone other than himself.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain, hope played like a playing card upon another hope, a wish for kindnesses and mercies to emerge like kings and queens in an unexpected change of the game. One could hold the cards oneself or not: they would land the same regardless.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“She was wearing an old summer dress as a nightgown, but in the mornings it could work as a dress again, if you just tossed a cardigan over it and put on shoes. In this risky manner, she knew, insanity could encroach.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“If you were alone when you were born, alone when you were dying, really absolutely alone when you were dead, why "learn to be alone" in between? If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You didn't have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell off the bike: I was drinking my wine too quickly.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“So much urgent and lifelike love went rumbling around underground and died there, never got expressed at all, so let some errant inconvenient attraction have its way. There was so little time”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“Win them with your beauty, but catch them off guard with your soul.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“When affection fell on its ass, politeness could step up.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“I'll go see her tonight,' I said. I felt I was a person of my word, and by saying something I could make it so. It was less like integrity perhaps and more like magic.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“Every family is a family of alligators.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“Although Kit and Rafe had met in the peace movement, marching, organizing, making no nukes signs, now they wanted to kill each other. They had become, also, a little pro-nuke.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark: Stories

“Perhaps everyone had their own way of preparing to die. Life got you ready.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“As a feminist you mustn’t blame the other woman,” a neighbor told her. “As a feminist I request that you no longer speak to me,” Kit replied.)”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark: Stories

“She hated money! though she knew it was like blood and you needed it. Still, it was also like blood in that she often couldn't stand the sight of it.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“Her body was a mix of thin and plump, her skin lined and unlined, in that rounding-the-corner-to-fifty way. Age and youth, he chanted silently, youth and age, sing their songs on the very same stage.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“Observing others go through them, he used to admire midlife crises, the courage and shamelessness and existential daring of them, but after he'd watched his own wife, a respectable nursery school teacher, produce and star in a full-blown one of her own, he found the sufferers of such crises not only self-indulgent but greedy and demented, and he wished them all weird unnatural deaths with various contraptions easily found in garages.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“I can't believe I just asked you to hold my hand,' said Ira, but Mike had already taken it.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You didn't have to go looking for it with open arms. With open arms, you fell off the bike: I was drinking my wine too quickly.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“he had had some eye work done: a lift to remove the puff and bloat; he would rather look startled and insane than look fifty-six.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“Oh, the beautiful smiles of the insane. Soon, he was sure, there would be a study that showed that the mentally ill were actually more attractive than other people. Dating proved it!”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark: Stories

“He had never been involved with the mentally ill before, but he now felt more than ever that there should be strong international laws against them being too good-looking.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark: Stories

“If dolphins tasted good,” he said, “we wouldn’t even know about their language.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark: Stories

“It broke her heart that they had come to this: if one knew the future, all the unexpected glimpses of the beloved, one might have trouble finding the courage to go on. This was probably the reason nine-tenths of the human brain had been rendered useless: to make you stupidly intrepid. One was working with only the animal brain, the Pringle brain. The wizard-god brain, the one that could see the future and move objects without touching them, was asleep. Fucking bastard.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“Tears, she had once been told, were designed to eliminate toxins, and they poured down her face and slimed her neck and gathered in the recesses of her collarbones and she had to be careful never to lie back and let them get into her ears, which might cause the toxins to return and start over. Of course, the rumor of toxins turned out not to be true. Tears were quite pure.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“Bummer,' said Ira, his new word for "I must remain as neutral as possible" and "Your mother's a whore.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“Unless you have a life of great importance," she said, regrets are stupid, crumpled-up tickets to a circus that has already left town.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain...”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark

“She recognized the panic at even a moment's boredom that all these piles contained, as well as the unreasonable hopefulness regarding time.”
― Lorrie Moore, Bark