Top 69 Catherine Lacey Quotes
#1. I found, increasingly, that I did not particularly care and I tried to fake a little kindness, a little sweetness, tried to mirror Luna back at herself, but that exhausted me after a week and I concluded that I was not meant for this sort of thing, friends, friendliness, no, I wasn't meant for it.
Catherine Lacey
#2. There's a certain kind of woman who will notice someone's terror and call it bravery.
Catherine Lacey
#3. not think about time or plans or deadlines or that rust spot in my old shower that bothered me so much or that wild animal with all the teeth charging toward me called the future,
Catherine Lacey
#4. Everyone wants to feel like they could destroy a small-to-medium-to-large part of someone who loves them.
Catherine Lacey
#5. I got used to it, in a way, being this sack of skin full of problems, because having a body doesn't give you the right to have one that works correctly. Having a body doesn't seem to give you any rights at all.
Catherine Lacey
#6. What a danger it is to love, how it warps a person from the inside, changes all the locks and loses all the keys.
Catherine Lacey
#7. To be hired as a girlfriend, sure, this seemed abnormal, but then again so many things seemed abnormal to me that I'd long ago learned not to trust that instinct.
Catherine Lacey
#8. most dependable things in the world are not of any significant use to any substantial problems.
Catherine Lacey
#9. I began to think that he had just the right measure of unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life to be someone I could get along with.
Catherine Lacey
#10. And he'd said nothing or something that amounted to nothing, and I tongued this memory like a burn in my mouth until the bathwater cooled and shook me back into my body where my fingerprints were ruffled.
Catherine Lacey
#11. Anytime two people can look at each other and talk honestly, that is God.
Catherine Lacey
#12. Ruby's tenth birthday party. She wore a red dress and we skated and she told me we were halfway to twenty and someday we would go to France.
Catherine Lacey
#13. and I had come to this country where I could laugh, so gently, gently laugh at things that were actually not funny.
Catherine Lacey
#14. Please describe the feeling of love.
Someone holding you by the wrist.
Catherine Lacey
#15. But there was no equation or series of questions that could turn this moment into an answer.
Catherine Lacey
#16. I'm here, I said, but I knew, increasingly, I wasn't here, and I felt that able-to-weep-and-be-seen version of myself that I'd been with Ruth hardening again, like warm caramel left to cool.
Catherine Lacey
#17. I wondered for a moment if he was trying to get me to join a cult, but I realized it was just his youth talking, not a dogma.
Catherine Lacey
#18. Judas put his arm around me. I smiled and thought of the words unreality and despair.
Catherine Lacey
#20. [...] being occasionally destroyed is, I think, a necessary part of the human experience.
Catherine Lacey
#21. You will never be missing to yourself and all you can do is delay, delay, delay and the delaying must be good enough for you and you must find a way to be fine with the delay because it is your whole life and the minute you really go missing is the minute you can no longer miss.
Catherine Lacey
#22. Perhaps someone would say I had no choice but to trust her and perhaps this is true, but also, and I understand this now, I love her and I loved her in that rare way, that non-possessive and accepting way that it seems people are always trying and failing to love someone...
Catherine Lacey
#23. I wasn't sure if it was safe for me to be sharing time and space with other people, who all seemed so much gentler and safer and less of a secret to themselves than I felt I was.
Catherine Lacey
#24. some places are not good places to be a person and not a car and that was where I was.
Catherine Lacey
#25. I worried that what I had seen in the driver was something I'd seen in myself, that it took me to know me.
Catherine Lacey
#26. I had witnessed the moment when this girl found out that nobody (not even Papa) knows what's going to happen to her or him or anyone and that's called Dramatic Tension and that's called the Suspense of Life and that's called Being Alive.
Catherine Lacey
#27. I was still new to this kind of adrenaline, the immediate release of anger instead of gnawing on it like overdue gum.
Catherine Lacey
#28. I sat up and again looked at the picture of the man who owned the ocean and wished I could please become him now, pinch my nose, close my eyes, and jump into some other life.
Catherine Lacey
#29. And I knew that it was possible he wasn't entirely right for me, but I also knew, in some way, that probably no one was right for me and potentially no one was right for anyone, but I also felt, with uncharacteristic sincerity, that we were as right for each other as any two people could manage.
Catherine Lacey
#30. Simon had perfected the art of seeing what he wanted to see, because it's easier to go through life like that, to see the world as a series of familiar things, a place where everyone feels how you feel and sees what you see.
Catherine Lacey
#31. He let himself laugh weakly.
That's terrible, I said, stepping out of my silence.
Is what it is.
People say that when they mean something is terrible.
You're right. It is terrible.
Catherine Lacey
#32. I had never really stopped thinking of how the smartest person I knew had, after much thought, decided that life was not worth it - that she'd be better off not living - and how was I supposed to live after that?
Catherine Lacey
#33. I couldn't blame anyone for what was in me, because I am, like everyone, populated entirely by myself.
Catherine Lacey
#34. And I began to believe that you could exchange your life, send it back for a different model, and I knew that wasn't really true but I also knew that it wasn't, here, entirely untrue.
Catherine Lacey
#36. Though I knew I had the potential to do this locked in me like a poisonous pet snake, I knew I didn't have the part of a person you must have to turn that potential kinetic, to be the kind of person who can let their awful plow.
Catherine Lacey
#37. I didn't have a solid opinion on the possibility of anyone's having psychic abilities or a fluency in reading auras, nor did I want to form an opinion about these things, to be one of those people with convictions about things they can't prove or disprove.
Catherine Lacey
#38. It felt possible--though I know this is absurd--that the use of my own body, the only thing I really owned, had somehow been repossessed.
Catherine Lacey
#39. Days are a finite resource and it's best to protect the ones you have.
Catherine Lacey
#40. The most beautiful country in the world, the bloke said a few times, but I knew that lots of people tell themselves things like that but there is no country that is the most beautiful country.
Catherine Lacey
#41. It was not that kind of leaving. I am not that kind of gone.
Catherine Lacey
#42. He didn't care if you were safe, he just cared if you were his.
Catherine Lacey
#43. as she slept, her period came because bodies know nothing about timing, bodies, awful bodies. They put a Rorschach between your thighs and stain your sheets to remind you that all you're doing is bleeding and dying if you're not making more life. That
Catherine Lacey
#44. I read somewhere that the first thing you learn when traveling is that you don't exist--I didn't want to stop not existing.
Catherine Lacey
#45. How someone wants to explain catastrophe isn't important--that's what I know now. When shit happens, it doesn't really matter what asshole is responsible.
Catherine Lacey
#46. I knew that my husband was a song that I had forgotten the words to and I was a fuzzy photograph of someone he used to love.
Catherine Lacey
#47. But we always avoided talking about these things - difficult things - and I wondered if that meant we'd be a little uncomfortable with or disappointed by each other for the rest of our lives.
Catherine Lacey
#49. I was beginning to realize that what I wanted was the noise of people living near me, but not near enough to cause any inaudible noises to show up because I knew that those sorts of noises often shift into inaudible minor chords and I am unable to deal with that shift.
Catherine Lacey
#50. All she ever said to me about him was You can only love a person that much once in your life, and I didn't know enough to agree or disagree with her. What a terrible and beautiful delusion, and how sad if it's true.
Catherine Lacey
#51. Being alone was what I wanted; being alone was not what I wanted.
Catherine Lacey
#52. What I was to do with my hands suddenly became a distinct and unsolvable problem.
Catherine Lacey
#53. I was thinking about stabbing myself in the face - not actually considering stabbing myself in the face, but thinking that it would be a physical expression of how I felt.
Catherine Lacey
#54. No one likes to be unrecognizable. No one wants to be a stranger to someone who is not a stranger to them.
Catherine Lacey
#55. I thought I'd make them understand, with rhetoric, with everything I had learned. I didn't realize I was ending it all, that it would really be that easy for me to vanish from the family.
Catherine Lacey
#56. There was at least one morning I was certain, though only for a few hours, that everything that could ever really happen to me had already happened to me...I try not to be so certain anymore.
Catherine Lacey
#57. It was clear then, so painfully clear, that people fell in love to find something in themselves that they'd had all along.
Catherine Lacey
#58. That's the thing about fiction, that you live in it totally for a little while, but you must forget it, sometimes totally forget it, in order to go about the rest of your day.
Catherine Lacey
#59. Looking at each other, something made sense that hadn't made sense before...I still don't know what it is or was about him, about us together (his pronunciation), that made us bind so decisively, two indecisive people so clear, for a time, about each other.
Catherine Lacey
#60. I walked toward the ocean, my brain somehow calm and empty, sick of itself, taking a sick day.
Catherine Lacey
#62. I thought I detected a bit of wonder in his voice, that he'd like to become part of a story, any story.
Catherine Lacey
#63. Lately, I couldn't remember those years, as if childhood was a movie I'd only seen the previews to.
Catherine Lacey
#64. I'm not a person who needs people, but I am the kind of person who needs to be near people who don't need me.
Catherine Lacey
#65. That boy never seemed to smile and he wore long sleeves year-round, and I was not so different from him - we were both unable to get near the real life in life.
Catherine Lacey
#66. You should never be in a hurry if you can help it. It's bad for everything. Bad for the stomach, the spleen, the skin. Especially bad for the joints. The knees and ankles. Rushing isn't healthy at all.
Catherine Lacey
#67. There's nothing better about living in a farm than living in a city. You can't just go sit in a pretty landscape and bet on it changing you into a better person.
Catherine Lacey
#68. What more could anyone want than to try to change and be changed by someone?
Catherine Lacey
#69. Why were we never together anymore, just alone in each other's vicinity?
Catherine Lacey
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