Lorrie Moore Quotes

It's not like you make a decision and everything inside you is 100 percent happy.

To be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too.

You may think of me as an object of desire and I'm going to tell you that I can be in front of you naked and not be erotic.

Whatever they may be in public life, whatever their relations with men, in their relations with women, all men are rapists, and that’s all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws and their codes.

If a man is pictured chopping off a woman's breast, it only gets an R rating; but if, God forbid, a man is pictured kissing a woman's breast, it gets an X rating. Why is violence more acceptable than tenderness?

When you dress and behave in a way that is designed primarily to arouse sexual desire in men, you are committing pornography with your life.

The wolf in him demanded he kick (the door) down and claim her. The man in him just wanted to hold her close and protect her. He’d never been so torn. So confused. So damned horny!

First of all, I love women. But I lust after beautiful women in the way that I lust after a beautiful piece of sculpture - this will probably get me in trouble - or a beautiful car. I believe everyone's on a sliding scale of sexuality. There are moments where I am sexually attracted to women. But it doesn't overpower my first impulse; my lust for them is the same as my lust for beauty in all things.

I am dragged along by a strange new force. Desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong.

As a Dominican man, you're socialized to be a playboy. You spend a lot of time being taught that women are important, but without the really positive framework of why. You figure out quickly it's because of culo (ass). But there is a sense that it's not that simple.

One must do violence to the object of one's desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.

He seems like a man who knows what he wants, and the problem is he wants what I want. If it were anything or anyone else, I could stand back and let him take it." His blue eyes gazed back at me. "But I can't let him have you.

It upsets women to be, or not to be, stared at hungrily.

All men are rapists and that's all they are

Desire, and the ways in which men perform their masculinity and feel as if they can take up space and say anything about your body, have always been a dangerous space for me.

I love him," I said, but even to my own ears I didn't sound happy about it.

I am overrun, infested with a menagerie of desires.

Craving that old sweet oneness yet dreading engulfment, wishing to be our mother's and yet be our own, we stormily swing from mood to mood, advancing and retreating-the quintessential model of two-mindedness.

I think I must be, absolutely, a total sex object. In every sense of the word.

Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper dirt, moon-everything belonged to the men who had the guns. . . . So you protected yourself and loved small. . . . A woman, a child, a brother-a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. . . . To get to a place where you could love anything you chose-not to need permission for desire-well now, that was freedom

He was sick with lust and mesmerized with regret

Gabriel pulled her over his body to lie on the bed beside him. His kisses pressed her down into the oblivion of the mattress as her hands explored his chest, his shoulders, his face. "I want to lay my kill at your feet," he said, more growl than words, and held her tight by her hair as he marked her neck with his teeth. She writhed against him. She wanted to bite him, she wanted to rip the flesh from his back, but most terrible of all, she didn't want him to stop. Her back arched, her body shattered, she howled.

I love women whose hidden desires make horses put an end to their lives at the threshold

Torn between the impulse to stroke his head, and the urge to cave it in with a rock, I did neither.

He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart