Lisa Moore > Quotes

“If you have children, trust them completely, all the time, no matter what. If you don't trust them, pretend that you do. Listen to everything they say and take their advice. Believe them.

Trust everyone. Everyone behaves better when they feel they're trusted. Nobody wins a fight; the trick is to behave decently no matter what. The trick is to make love a lot. And think of it as making love. Always be making love.

Read lots of books. Read books from foreign countries. Forget yourself. Get lost in it. Give yourself over. Look up from your book and see that it is dark now and everything has changed.”
― Lisa Moore

“While he sat there he decided he would buy a waterbed. He had always imagined owning a waterbed when he was successful, but now it struck him that getting the bed might invoke the man he wanted to become. You bought a waterbed and so became the sort of man who owned a waterbed.”
― Lisa Moore, Alligator

“I think about how much of a good story seems to happen elsewhere, off the canvas or screen or page, in Europe or a backwater New Brunswick town, in what is left unsaid. A word on the tip of the tongue, ungraspable. The teasing smush of a feather boa over naked breasts in a striptease.”
― Lisa Moore, Open: Stories

“It has taken stealth and some underhandedness. It has taken clarity of purpose when the moment called for dreamy abandon. He has practised withdrawal.”
― Lisa Moore, February

“She sleeps and sometimes she dreams him, and it is wrenching to wake up. There is no talk in these dreams, no actual words, but she knows what he wants; he wants her to follow him.

How awful. Death has made him selfish.

[...]

When she wakes up she is full of guilt because she decided to stay. Something rigid and life-loving and unwilling to cave in takes over. She betrays him in this way, every single night of her life, and it's exhausting. She denies him, she forgets him. Every time she says no to him in a dream, she forgets him a little bit more.”
― Lisa Moore, February

“This is what Helen has learned: it is possible to be so tired you cannot reach for the sky, you cannot breathe. You can’t even talk. You can’t pick up the phone. You can’t do a dish or dance or cook or do up your own zipper.”
― Lisa Moore

“She'd gone into the glass booth of the station to pay and the young man behind the counter was reading Anna Karenina and he turned the book over on the counter regretfully. She saw the big Russian saga drain out of his eyes as he took her in...she had watched as the gas attendant dragged himself from a cold night in Russia, full of passion and big fireplaces and lust. Back into the cold, lonely night of St. John's to take Helen's debit card, and she had felt motherly.”
― Lisa Moore, February

“The dead are not individuals, she thought. They are all the same. That's what made it so very hard to stay in love with them. Like men who enter prison and are stripped of their worldly possessions, clothes, jewellery, the dead were stripped of who they were. Nothing every happened to them, they did not change or grow, but they didn't stay the same either. They are not the same as they were when they were alive, Helen thought.

The act of being dead, if you could call it an act, made them very hard to love. They'd lost the capacity to surprise. You needed a strong memory to love the dead, and it was not her fault that she was failing. She was trying. But no memory was that strong. This is what she knew now: no memory was that strong.”
― Lisa Moore, February

“Doubt was a luxury, according to her mother, and it was always better to act, however unsure you might be.”
― Lisa Moore, Alligator

“Afraid was good, he thought. Change requires fear, he knew this too.”
― Lisa Moore, Alligator

“John had a photographic memory...this wasn't smart, exactly, but it could pass for smart.

Smart was about intuition, and John had that too. Smart was: you didn't exert effort but you knew the answer anyways. You thought about it, yes, but the answer came via a different route. Smart was: you always had access to that different route. The answer came in the back door while you were cooking or even while you slept.”
― Lisa Moore, February

“Conclusions were necessary and she had come up with them.”
― Lisa Moore, February

“If the death of his mother was behind the curtain, John realized he was unequal to it. He knew he was just a kid and that he should not understand about being unequal to anything. Most people don't have to face that kind of realization until they were well out of childhood; he knew all that. But he had learned too early that you could be unequal to your situation.”
― Lisa Moore, February

“His experience: everybody is afraid of something. Find out what everybody else is afraid of and go into that.”
― Lisa Moore, February

“Looking at his dead son must have been like watching a movie where nothing moved. It was not photograph because it had duration. It had to be lived through. A photograph has none of that. This was a story without an ending. It would go on forever.”
― Lisa Moore, February

“People do not say "failed" any more, Jane thinks. They say other things. A whole movement has risen up to avoid the acknowledgement of failure. People want to learn from failure, they want to embrace it.

But failure isn't good, she thinks. If something can be redeemed it isn't really a failure.”
― Lisa Moore, February

“The present is always dissolving into the past, he realized long ago. The present dissolves. It gets used up. The past is virulent and ravenous and everything can be devoured in a matter of seconds.

That's the enigma of the present. The past has already infiltrated it; the past has set up camp, deployed soldiers with toothbrushes to scrub away all of the now, and the more you think about it, the faster everything dissolves. There is no present. There was no present. Or, another way to think about it: your life could go on without you.”
― Lisa Moore, February