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This wasn't a commodifiable realization, the kind of thing in college essays or inspirational books or the hardbound journals of gentle ladies. There was no ah, no ha, no relaxation or humor folded into this realization. There was just something real in my head - a rescue boat in a sea where there was no one left to save.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: This wasn't a commodifiable realization,
Judas put his arm around me. I smiled and thought of the words unreality and despair.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: Judas put his arm around
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 Quotes: Though I knew I had
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 Quotes: I wasn't sure if it
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 Quotes: I wondered for a moment
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 Quotes: But we always avoided talking
Maybe misery begins everywhere.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: Maybe misery begins everywhere.
I hiked up a path and into the woods, thinking about what I should be thinking about and almost having a real feeling - a feeling like, this is really sad, this is a sad place to be, a sad part of my life, maybe just a sad life. The woods were not particularly beautiful. I was not impressed by the trees.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: I hiked up a path
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 Quotes: That boy never seemed to
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 Quotes: And I knew that it
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 Quotes: Ruby's tenth birthday party. She
Love is a compromise for only getting to be one person.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: Love is a compromise for
The sheep stampeded away because sheep are smart enough not to trust anyone for anything, especially not people who sleep in and crawl out of sheds, and I couldn't disagree with those sheep because I would run away from me, too, if I was a sheep and not me and even if I was me, I'd still like, some mornings, to be the thing running far from me instead of sewn inside myself forever.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: The sheep stampeded away because
There are some things that only other people can do to you.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: There are some things that
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 Quotes: I was beginning to realize
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 Quotes: I worried that what I
Days are a finite resource and it's best to protect the ones you have.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: Days are a finite resource
Maybe I will always have to love the idea of love or a concept of God more than I can love a person. But then, these things are so difficult to measure - how could you even quantify or compare one love to another? By weight? By volume? And who is to say that loving a person isn't just loving the idea of that person and not the actual person, all these incomprehensible clots of flesh with all their years gone by and vanished, all their history stored in basements even they cannot reach?
Catherine Lacey Quotes: Maybe I will always have
It was grotesque and eerie, too strange of a dream.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: It was grotesque and eerie,
I knew that this sort of love, technically, was just a neurotransmitter cocktail designed to make you feel invincible and infinite – beyond language, beyond logic – but I also knew that love was as thrilling as it was temporary, a prelude to pain, though I only knew this through reading – which is to say I had not really learned it yet and may never. That little shimmer in the chest. How simple it seems.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: I knew that this sort
. . . waiting for . . . some kind of kindness or understanding to tell me, Self, it is all fine and okay. Close your eyes. Tomorrow will be fine. But I never have been the kind to keep a back-stock of that kind of kindness, the way that other people do, taking care of themselves and others, being ready to forgive.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: . . . waiting for
and I had come to this country where I could laugh, so gently, gently laugh at things that were actually not funny.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: and I had come to
And it's still unclear to me why a person has abilities that they do not want to have, why a person feels things that person doesn't want to feel and why that person doesn't feel things that person does want to feel, and why a person falls out of love when being in love was such a good thing to be in, and why a person makes loud and clumsy attempts at midnight to kill the life one could reasonably expect that person to want to preserve.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: And it's still unclear to
I needed nothing and was needed nowhere. I almost doubted I was alive.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: I needed nothing and was
A tremendous amount of my brain was fitted with noticing new things out where nothing was familiar: buildings, types of cars, types of people, accents, plants, packaged-food items. Before I left my brain never had to register my bedroom, my husband, mailbox, apple core, alarm clock, walls. My brain just said " - , - , - , - , - , - , - , - ," to these things, because a brain lets you keep going, keep not seeing the same walls, underwear, husband, doorknobs, ceiling, husband, husband. A brain can be merciful in this way: sparing you the monotony of those monotonies, their pitiful cozy. A brain lets all the borefilled days shrink like drying sponges until they're hard and ungiving
Catherine Lacey Quotes: A tremendous amount of my
I closed my eyes, tried to get as far away from myself as I could.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: I closed my eyes, tried
I was still new to this kind of adrenaline, the immediate release of anger instead of gnawing on it like overdue gum.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: I was still new to
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 Quotes: as she slept, her period
He was looking at me like I was a very nice thing of his that wasn't working quite like it should, like he'd found a defect, a defect that was extremely disappointing because he had spent a lot of time doing his research and believed he had gotten a thing that was guaranteed against these kinds of defects, and maybe there was some kind of glitch in the system and maybe he needed to have a professional assess the situation, give him an estimate.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: He was looking at me
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 Quotes: I found, increasingly, that I
Eventually she got out of bed, took a long shower, gargling and spitting mouthfuls of water, then screaming, just a little and quietly.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: Eventually she got out of
He didn't care if you were safe, he just cared if you were his.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: He didn't care if you
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 Quotes: You should never be in
What more could anyone want than to try to change and be changed by someone?
Catherine Lacey Quotes: What more could anyone want
Writing regularly has always been the primary way I've avoided a nervous breakdown, so it's unclear to me whether it's a joyful or medicinal activity. It's probably both." @_catherinelacey, author of Certain American States, out today from @fsgbooks
Catherine Lacey Quotes: Writing regularly has always been
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 Quotes: I had witnessed the moment
Being alone was what I wanted; being alone was not what I wanted.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: Being alone was what I
most dependable things in the world are not of any significant use to any substantial problems.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: most dependable things in the
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 Quotes: I was thinking about stabbing
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 Quotes: What a danger it is
She missed his nothing. It had felt like something.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: She missed his nothing. It
Someone said once that they'd never heard of a crime they couldn't imagine committing, and I realized then that if I had a daughter and she had a rabbit and that rabbit was alone with me and I was feeling the way I felt right now and I had a way to kill that rabbit and the time to spend killing that rabbit then killing the rabbit was something I could imagine myself possibly doing or at least considering doing or being on the edge of doing. And smearing a husband with the blood wasn't such a far step after that if you had a desire to smear your husband with blood and smearing someone with blood was something I could imagine a situation calling for because there were at least a few people in this world that I wouldn't not like to see smeared with blood - one person being Werner for fucking my plans, for sending me back out into a life with my wildebeest, to figure out a way to live here and I didn't want to do that and I didn't know how to do that and I wasn't sure how I was going to do that -
Catherine Lacey Quotes: Someone said once that they'd
I barely managed to do the small talk - the what-do-you-do, the where-are-you-from, the what-neighborhood, the what-college, the despair of trying to explain oneself.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: I barely managed to do
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 Quotes: All she ever said to
It's disappointing enough to know that the people we love will sometimes lie, but it is almost worse when we remember that strangers do this too, and this is why it is best not to admit our lies to strangers because it is not pleasant to learn that someone will lie even when there is little to nothing at stake.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: It's disappointing enough to know
Please describe the feeling of love.
Someone holding you by the wrist.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: Please describe the feeling of
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 Quotes: To be hired as a
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 Quotes: There was at least one
I thought of all those billions of hearts beating out there, trying to find love or keep love going. All those people, getting in the way of each other - how do we even stand it? How do we make our way around?
Catherine Lacey Quotes: I thought of all those
. . . overcast afternoons when it seemed possible the whole world had run out of things to say.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: . . . overcast afternoons
She was sure no one had ever been more in love than they were in those weeks, consumed by such longing, wanting to just be alive beside each other.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: She was sure no one
This was a feeling I had often, the sense of a subtext.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: This was a feeling I
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 Quotes: It was clear then, so
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 Quotes: I began to think that
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 Quotes: The most beautiful country in
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 Quotes: I'm not a person who
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 Quotes: There's nothing better about living
Something my grandmother, who was a fascist, used to say was You have to count your blessings. Once I asked here why you have to count your blessings and she gave me a great smack to the ear. Because you have to. She was the most beloved fascist in my family, all of whom were flag-waving fascists.
Do I sometimes think fondly of her? Do I have a choice?
Catherine Lacey Quotes: Something my grandmother, who was
[...] I became a haver-of-authentic emotions, an openhearted, well-adjusted, and thriving person, a dependable employee, a woman who could go out to a deli and order a sandwich and eat it and read the newspaper without thinking of the sentence I AM A GROWN WOMAN, EATING OFF A PLATE, AND READING THE NEWS, because I was not an observer of myself, but a be-er of myself, a person who just WAS instead of a person who was almost.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: [...] I became a haver-of-authentic
Then it was June and I started to feel like a new woman---not in a new-lease-on-life kind of way, more like a refinanced mortgage.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: Then it was June and
Speaking felt impossible, as contained and enclosed as she was, a longing that went on a loop, a longing for nothing at all.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: Speaking felt impossible, as contained
It was not that kind of leaving. I am not that kind of gone.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: It was not that kind
What is the point of love? To distract us.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: What is the point of
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 Quotes: How someone wants to explain
The telephone hardly ever rings but when it does, there is a good chance it is someone asking me how I am, and if I really tried to answer that question I suppose I could say I'm doing as well and as terribly as I ever have been, but if you stop answering questions, people stop asking them, and if you stop answering the phone, it eventually stops ringing.
A month goes by, you think – Oh, I've finally done it.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: The telephone hardly ever rings
No one is anything more than a slow event and I knew I was not a woman but a series of movements, not a life, but a shake, and this put a knot in my throat and a pause in my breathing and it turned in my stomach, to know that my stomach was not a stomach but a turn and my breath was nothing if it did not move and my throat without voice was just some slowly decaying meat but I had nothing to say anymore, not yet, and BELINDA refilled my coffee and the surface rolled and rippled and then it almost stilled but not quite because it shook as it will always shake and I watched it keep shaking (pg.244).
Catherine Lacey Quotes: No one is anything more
Everyone wants to feel like they could destroy a small-to-medium-to-large part of someone who loves them.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: Everyone wants to feel like
I went outside after my beer and looked down into the ocean and saw a stingray flapping in the water, a jagged C torn into his body and ribbons of blood running out, same color as mine, as anything's, and I knew that stingray had been chewed by something because that is all the ocean is -- big hole full of things chewing each other -- and it's odd that people go to the beach and stare at the waving water and feel relaxed because what they are looking at is just the blue curtain over a wild violence, lives eating lives, the unstoppable chew, and I wondered if any of those vacationing people feel all the blood rushing under the surface, and I wondered if the fleshy, dying underside of the ocean is what they're really after as they stare -- that ferocious pulse under all things placid.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: I went outside after my
It seemed that my identity had necessarily split, that I'd turned into a different person. I could look at her now and see all that stoic ferocity in her eyes, how she wanted to do something that could never be undone. Something permanent. Some little forever. But I'm not interested in forever. Not anymore.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: It seemed that my identity
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 Quotes: He let himself laugh weakly.<br
But there was no equation or series of questions that could turn this moment into an answer.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: But there was no equation
There was no reason to leave. So I put my brain elsewhere and when it got dark I realized that all the bars and cafes were full of people who had been becoming more and more exuberant and loud and drunk, and I looked through a window into one and there were people dancing against each other and smiling and drinking and they were all wearing Santa hats: women wearing Santa hats, old men in Santa hats, flimsy-legged boys with thick dreadlocks wearing Santa hats, and why did they want to impersonate someone who only gives and disappears?
Catherine Lacey Quotes: There was no reason to
Lately, I couldn't remember those years, as if childhood was a movie I'd only seen the previews to.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: Lately, I couldn't remember those
I tried to pick the burned ones from the bowl but I didn't get many of them because I didn't make much of an effort, and even though I was taking the burned ones out because they weren't edible, I ate them because, at the moment, I thought it would be better if everyone learned to consume their own mistakes.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: I tried to pick the
Moments never stay, whether or not you ask them, they do not care, no moment cares, and the ones you wish could stretch out like a hammock for you to lie in, well, those moments leave the quickest and take everything good with them, little burglars, those moments, those hours, those days you loved the most.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: Moments never stay, whether or
People in large quantities are terrible.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: People in large quantities are
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 Quotes: Simon had perfected the art
Let me say that whoever invented wanting, whoever came up with desire, whoever had the first one and let us all catch it like a hot-pink plague, I would like to tell that person that it wasn't fair of him or her to unleash such a thing upon the world without leaving us a warranty or at the very least an instruction manual about how to manage, how to live with, how to understand this thing that can happen in a person against her will, by which I mean desire and the need it gnaws in us and the shadow it leaves when it's gone.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: Let me say that whoever
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 Quotes: I knew that my husband
There's a certain kind of woman who will notice someone's terror and call it bravery.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: There's a certain kind of
some places are not good places to be a person and not a car and that was where I was.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: some places are not good
I think brains might be machines that turn information into feelings and feelings back into decisions and I've discovered that my machine has been put together in a strange way and it translates life in a strange way but I have no way to fix this - I'm not a brain-machine fixer, I'm just a haver of a brain, like anyone, and none of us know how to fix ourselves, at least not entirely, not well enough
Catherine Lacey Quotes: I think brains might be
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 Quotes: Perhaps someone would say I
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 Quotes: I thought I'd make them
I couldn't decide how to feel about what he was saying, whether it was all nonsense or just more evidence that I would never understand this world.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: I couldn't decide how to
I wondered why my husband couldn't have just been all bad. Why couldn't he have been a cartoon villain, someone I could have fled from and known I had made the right decision? Why must there be nice memories of him sitting beside the ugly ones, both of them oblivious, strangers on a bus?
Catherine Lacey Quotes: I wondered why my husband
My body felt like tangled rubber bands and dried-out pens and sticky paper clips, like the contents of a drawer where you put the things you don't have anywhere else to put, and I knew that the mind and body are connected, and that my bodily sensations were just messages from my mind, but I just wished there was a box or a drawer or a hole in the ground where I could put all this, all this mind and body stuff that I didn't know what else to do with.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: My body felt like tangled
I knew that my mind was a small object for sale and my feelings could pick me up and own me and maybe my husband was too expensive for feelings to choose him, to pick him up and have him rung up and scanned and bagged and taken along with those feelings, feelings of I can't really get out of bed today and Husband, would you please not talk to me for the rest of the year.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: I knew that my mind
What I was to do with my hands suddenly became a distinct and unsolvable problem.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: What I was to do
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 Quotes: I thought I detected a
...until the weeds were all wilted in a heap, and all I could think was how there would be more weeds tomorrow and wouldn't it be easier for the world if everything just stayed still, just stopped growing all together? Maybe it would, but we won't do that, we won't stop, plants don't, people don't, we keep showing up and living and trying to do something and dying and what was it that all these vines and leaves were struggling toward year after century after eternity?
Catherine Lacey Quotes: ...until the weeds were all
I could never delete my own history, and I would always know exactly where I was and where I had been and I would never wake up not being who I was and it didn't matter how much or how little I thought I understood the mess of myself, because I would never, no matter what I did, be missing to myself and that was what I had wanted all this time, to go fully missing, but I would never be able to go fully missing - nobody is missing like that, no one has ever had that luxury and no one ever will.
Catherine Lacey Quotes: I could never delete my
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