Lucy Grealy Quotes

The general plot of life is sometimes shaped by the different ways genuine intelligence combines with equally genuine ignorance. ~ Lucy Grealy

This singularity of meaning
I was my face, I was ugliness
though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape. It became the launching pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked what was wrong with my life. Everything led to it, everything receded from it
my face as personal vanishing point. ~ Lucy Grealy

When a film's heroine innocently coughs, you know that two scenes later, at most, she'll be in an oxygen tent; when a man bumps into a woman at the train station, you know that man will become the woman's lover and/or murderer. In everyday life, where we cough often and are always bumping into people, our daily actions rarely reverberate so lucidly. Once we love or hate someone, we can think back and remember that first casual encounter. But what of all the chance meetings that nothing ever comes of? While our bodies move ever forward on the time line, our minds continuously trace backward, seeking shape and meaning as deftly as any arrow seeking its mark. ~ Lucy Grealy

Through [my friends] I discovered what it was to love people. There was an art to it ... which was not really all that different from the love that is necessary in the making of art. It required the effort of always seeing them for themselves and not as I wished them to be ... ~ Lucy Grealy

All narratives, even the confusing, are implicitly hopeful; they speak of a world that can be ordered, and thus understood. ~ Lucy Grealy

Partly I was honing my self-consciousness into a torture device, sharp and efficient enough to last me the rest of my life. ~ Lucy Grealy

Beauty, as defined by society at large, seemed to be only about who was best at looking like everyone else. ~ Lucy Grealy

I treated despair in terms of hierarchy: if there was a more important pain in the world, it meant my own was negated. I thought I simply had to accept the fact that I was ugly, and that to feel despair about it was simply wrong. ~ Lucy Grealy

I spent five years of my life being treated for cancer, but since then I've spent fifteen years being treated for nothing other than looking different from everyone else. It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly, that I always viewed as the great tragedy of my life. The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison. ~ Lucy Grealy

Animals were both the lives I took care of and the lives who took care of me. ~ Lucy Grealy

Does this raise or lower, then, the everyday importance of art? Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape? (excerpted letter from Lucy Grealy) ~ Ann Patchett

I was never happier than on the nights we stayed home, lying on the living room rug. We talked about classes and poetry and politics and sex. Neither of us were in love with the Iowa Writers' Workshop, but it didn't really matter because we had no place else to go. What we had was the little home we made together, our life in the ugly green duplex. We lived next door to a single mother named Nancy Tate who was generous in all matters. She would drive us to the grocery store and give us menthol cigarettes and come over late at night after her son was asleep to sit in our kitchen and drink wine and talk about Hegel and Marx. Iowa City in the eighties was never going to be Paris in the twenties, but we gave it our best shot. ~ Ann Patchett

I began a lifelong affair with nostalgia, with only the vaguest notions of what I was nostalgic for. ~ Lucy Grealy

Language supplies us with ways to express ever subtler levels of meaning, but does that imply language gives meaning, or robs us of it when we are at a loss to name things? ~ Lucy Grealy

I used to think truth was eternal, that once I knew, once I saw, it would be with me forever, a constant by which everything else could be measured. I know now that this isn't so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things. Society is no help. It tells us again and again that we can most be ourselves by acting and looking like someone else ... ~ Lucy Grealy

And knew without doubt that I was living in a story Kafka would have been proud to write. ~ Lucy Grealy

The school year progressed slowly. I felt as if I had been in the sixth grade for years, yet it was only October. Halloween was approaching. Coming from Ireland, we had never thought of it as a big holiday, though Sarah and I usually went out trick-or treating. For the last couple of years I had been too sick to go out, but this year Halloween fell on a day when I felt quiet fine. My mother was the one who came up with the Eskimo idea. I put on a winter coat, made a fish out of paper, which I hung on the end of a stick, and wrapped my face up in a scarf. My hair was growing in, and I loved the way the top of the hood rubbed against it. By this time my hat had become part of me; I took it off only at home. Sometimes kids would make fun of me, run past me, knock my hat off, and call me Baldy. I hated this, but I assumed that one day my hair would grow in, and on that day the teasing would end.

We walked around the neighborhood with our pillowcase sacks, running into other groups of kids and comparing notes: the house three doors down gave whole candy bars, while the house next to that gave only cheap mints. I felt wonderful. It was only as the night wore on and the moon came out and the older kids, the big kids, went on their rounds that I began to realize why I felt so good. No one could see me clearly. No one could see my face. ~ Lucy Grealy

Life in general was cruel and offered only different types of voids and chaos. The only way to tolerate it, to have any hope of escaping it, I reasoned, was to know my own strength, to defy life by surviving it. ~ Lucy Grealy

Now I knew that joy was a kind of fearlessness, a letting go of expectations that the world should be anything other than what it was. ~ Lucy Grealy

During the night, while Bull and Lucy slept, Edward, with ever-open eyes, stared up at the constellations. He said their names, and then he said the names of the people who loved him. He started with Abilene, and then went on to Nellie and Lawrence and from there to Bull and Lucy, and then he ended again with Abilene: Abilene, Nellie, Lawrence, Bull, Lucy, Abilene.
See? Edward told Pellegrina. I am not like the princess. I know about love. ~ Kate DiCamillo

I think, in art, it is as noble a thing as to to try to make people happy, to help them escape, as it is to make them think. And perhaps more difficult. ~ Lucy Foley

But Lucy, I've no money."
I put my face up to his and smiled.
He smiled back.
"Frankly my dear," I beamed, "I don't give a damn."
I had always wanted to say that. ~ Marian Keyes

Playing Lissa was the most thrilling, terrifying, uplifting, fulfilling, surprising, and experience of my life. ~ Lucy Fry

When you've been around as long as me, Lucy, you'll know that there are three types of sex ... One - brand-new, kitchen-table sex. Two - bedroom sex. Then number three - hallway sex, when you pass each other in the hallway and say 'Fuck you.' - Lockie ~ Kathy Lette

A drop of water, if it could write out its own history, would explain the universe to us. ~ Lucy Larcom

I told you that life is full of big scary things, but most of those big scary things only look that way because we're so small. That when you walk up to the things that scare you, they aren't usually so big or scary. ~ Lucy Smoke

The air is impressively warm and close, as thick as honey. ~ Lucy Foley

Christ, we've only been here for five minutes. It's like being stuck in the Tardis. Time has lost all meaning." He turned away to ditch his cocktail glass, thus missing Lainie's gobsmacked expression. A Doctor Who reference from her second-least-favorite person? Wonders never ceased. ~ Lucy Parker

The Sick Woman begins to see that life is wilder, more chaotic, harsher and more loving, paradoxical, and downright strange than she was ever taught. She discovers for herself the power of moon and the tides, the shifting of the stars and the seasons, the haze of pollen and shift in air pressure and how they impact her dreams, her moods, her body processes. She learns that she is not an independent automaton but a wild being woven of life and death, a chaos of magic, not a machine of logic. She learns that the outer impacts the inner in myriad ways. And vice versa. She learns that she is simultaneously weaker and yet more powerful than she ever knew. She is dangerous with this knowledge which does not appear in the medical books and bibles except as anomalies. She's singing from the wrong hymn sheet and messing up the patina of perfection that the patriarchy is aiming for. In a display of a million marching soldiers with polished boots, gleaming medals and straight legs, there is the sick woman, bare breasted, hair loose, scars showing, shameless, dancing to her own tune. ~ Lucy H. Pearce

my sweet old etcetera
aunt lucy during the recent

war could and what
is more did tell you just
what everybody was fighting

for,
my sister

isabel created hundreds
(and
hundreds) of socks not to
mention shirts fleaproof earwarmers

etcetera wristers etcetera, my

mother hoped that

i would die etcetera
bravely of course my father used
to become hoarse talking about how it was
a privilege and if only he
could meanwhile my

self etcetera lay quietly
in the deep mud et

cetera
(dreaming,
et
cetera, of
Your smile
eyes knees and of your Etcetera) ~ E. E. Cummings

Anne Shirley. Anne with an e. ~ Lucy Maud Montgomery

Complete nudity in itself is not erotic. It becomes so only when preceeded by or contrasted to a state of dress. In this limited context then, all clothes become somewhat immoral, if we define immorality as inciting sexual interest. Habitual nakedness may indeed be capable of elevating man to a higher mental plane ~ Lucy Irvine

It is a strange thing to read a letter after the writer is dead - a bitter-sweet thing, in which pain and comfort are strangely mingled. ~ Lucy Maud Montgomery

They decreed that rabbis were no longer to function as rabbis, that they could not teach, or decide Jewish questions in rabbinical courts, or be paid by their community. Each of them had to announce in the Yiddish press that he had ceased all rabbinical duties and that no one was to consult him about anything. This was to be the end of hundreds and hundreds of years of religious life. ~ Lucy Beckett

Let me be absolutely clear: Tumnus was an idiot. He was absolutely NOT a spy for the White Witch. That dude couldn't have spied on a blind unicorn. He was a deadbeat who spent most of his time sitting on street corners, playing his pan flute, and panhandling for change. He was on the Narnia version of welfare, and he told the White Witch about Lucy in the hopes of getting some kind of handout. ~ Stephen Altrogge

I had a very nice, cozy childhood. I did lots of plays at school and worked with the National Youth Theatre as a teenager. ~ Lucy Punch

There is indeed something omnivorous about the act of photography. It offers a way of responding to everything about everything. ~ Lucy R. Lippard

It didn't make me glow. I felt more like I was fading away, like the world had forgotten me. ~ Lucy Christopher

I think Nevada is going to really be the first true test of whether or not these candidates have particular strengths in particular demographics. ~ Lucy Flores

It's hard to hate someone once you understand them. It felt so mixed up. ~ Lucy Christopher

I love shutting my front door and being at home with just my dog and me. That's when I'm happiest. ~ Lucy Davis

Now that it's over, I just wanna hold her
I'd give up all the world to see
That little piece of heaven looking back at me.
Now that it's over, I just wanna hold her.
I've gotta live with the choices I've made
And I can't live with myself today. ~ Skillet

I didn't learn how to read and write until pretty late, and it was this very mysterious, incredible thing, like driving, that I didn't get to do. And then I started writing things down on little scraps of paper and I would hide them. I would write the year on them and then I would stuff them in a drawer somewhere. But I didn't start to really read until about eight. I'm dyslexic, so it took a long time. ~ Lucy Corin

As a rule, I am very careful to be shallow and conventional where depth and originality are wasted. ~ Lucy Maud Montgomery

Little Lucy, dressed in white
Gave her mother such a fright
Walked into the woods one day
Where she went no one can say
Down a road that no one found
Or are her bones sunk in the ground?
How many steps did Lucy take?
One, two, there, four... ~ Kate Alice Marshall

Each book is a world entire. You're going to have to take more than one pass at it. ~ Lucy Mangan

I was a really bad teenager and I got my tongue pierced. I don't even remember where I did it, but it was under very surreptitious circumstances. ~ Lucy Alibar

You'll have to turn your back.
He turned slowly. The view from the back was just as good as the view from the front. I could practically hear Lucy snickering in the back of my head. I might be the vampire daughter, but she was the one who was a bad influence. No question. ~ Alyxandra Harvey

I don't believe in objectivity. I observe the observer's paradox every moment I'm filming. Your presence is changing everything; there's no mistaking it. And you have a responsibility. ~ Lucy Walker

It was like a horse, really. The trick was not to grab, but to caress. "Tuscan Tycoon's Wife ~ Lucy Gordon

Zachary's mother, Lucy, waylaid him on the third-floor landing and offered, unsolicited, her opinion that the Traumatics had been the kind of adolescently posturing, angst-mongering boy group that never interested her. Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence
the drama of being her
was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation. Katz had encountered, practically verbatim, the same provocation a hundred times before, which put him in the ridiculous position now of feeling bad for being unable to pretend to be provoked: of pitying Lucy's doughty little ego, its floatation on a sea of aging-female insecurity. He doubted he could get anywhere with her even if he felt like trying, but he knew that her pride would be hurt if he didn't make at least a token effort to be disagreeable. (p. 194) ~ Jonathan Franzen

The sand stretched out gray and ghostlike and illuminated, a column of light leading forward. It was like something a dead person would see, a tunnel leading toward heaven. ~ Lucy Christopher

Miss Mapp moved towards the screen.

"What a delicious big screen," she said.

"Yes, but don't go behind it, Mapp," said Irene, "or you'll see my model undressing."

Miss Mapp retreated from it precipitately, as from a wasp's nest, and examined some of the studies on the wall, for it was more than probable from the unfinished picture on the easel that Adam lurked behind the delicious screen. Terrible though it all was, she was conscious of an unbridled curiosity to know who Adam was. It was dreadful to think that there could be any man in Tilling so depraved as to stand to be looked at with so little on...

Irene strolled round the walls with her.

"Studies of Lucy," she said.

"I see, dear," said Miss Mapp. "How clever! Legs and things! But when you have your bridge-party, won't you perhaps cover some of them up, or turn them to the wall? We should all be looking at your pictures instead of attending to our cards. And if you were thinking of asking the Padre, you know..."

They were approaching the corner of the room where the screen stood, when a movement there as if Adam had hit it with his elbow made Miss Mapp turn round. The screen fell flat on the ground and within a yard of her stood Mr. Hopkins, the proprietor of the fish-shop just up the street. Often and often had Miss Mapp had pleasant little conversations with him, with a view to bringing down the price of flounders. He had little bathing-drawer ~ E.F. Benson

When I later discovered that she (illustrator Faith Jaques) was a compulsive reader who loved to be alone and kept cats because they are the only pets that allow you to be both, my adoration of Jaques and her work could only increase. ~ Lucy Mangan

Lucy Green couldn't stop reading. She was a secret reader ... ~ Alice Hoffman

After all that is bewitching in the idea of a single and constant attachment, and all that can be said of one's happiness depending entirely on any particular person, it is not meant
it is not fit
it is not possible that it should be so.
Edward will marry Lucy ~ Jane Austen

Strike had never wanted children; it was one of the things on which he and Charlotte had always agreed, and it had been one of the reasons other relationships over the years had foundered. Lucy deplored his attitude, and the reasons he gave for it; she was always miffed when he stated life aims that differed from hers, as though he were attacking her decisions and choices. ~ Robert Galbraith

Lucy, a girl's name for Lucifer. That my mother would have found me devil-like did not surprise me, for I often thought of her as god-like, and are not the children of gods devils? I did not grow to like the name Lucy-I would have much preferred to be called Lucifer outright-but whenever I saw my name I always reached out to give it a strong embrace. ~ Jamaica Kincaid