Catherine Lacey Quotes & Sayings

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

information that my husband had archived - things I had done, he had done, words I had said, he had said, verbatim sentences he could remember spoken by himself or others or me, things we'd seen or done or places we'd been, verbatim places, verbatim people, exactly precisely factually factual things he could remember that I could not or could not quite, completely, remember. So my husband was this constant fact-checker of my life and the idea of him making things up, intentionally or not, had occurred to me, that maybe many of the things he had told me had happened, had, perhaps, never happened - Elyria, when did it occur — Catherine Lacey

Anytime two people can look at each other and talk honestly, that is God. — Catherine Lacey

I couldn't blame anyone for what was in me, because I am, like everyone, populated entirely by myself. — Catherine Lacey

And this is the difference between me and the rest of the world: most people can let their feelings shift without a wildebeest smashing them up from the inside, but I, for some reason, cannot - and, still, I am more human than wildebeest so I'll never be exempt from the human need for other people to be near, but because I am part wildebeest they can't be too near, and I would like to apologize for that but I can't apologize for that, I can't apologize to everyone who deserves an apology for it, unless no one deserves anything, in which case, what a relief, because I can give everyone that nothing - I can give them nothing all day. — Catherine Lacey

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

I wondered which things inside a person might be indigenous or nonindigenous, but it isn't as easy to trace those kinds of things in a person as it is in a country. I wished that I could point to some colonizer and blame him for everything that was nonindigenous in me, whoever or whatever had fucked my ecosystem, had made me misunderstand myself - but I couldn't blame anyone for it. — Catherine Lacey

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

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

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

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

No one likes to be unrecognizable. No one wants to be a stranger to someone who is not a stranger to them. — Catherine Lacey

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

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

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

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

She wished Felix and Jay were babies again, though they were never babies at the same time, and she wished she could have been a baby with them, too, that they could all lie in a thoughtless baby lump, void of all responsibilities and knowledge, without history, just soft skin and fat, piled on each other like puppies, mother and children, impossibly all infants at the same time. She — Catherine Lacey

I walked toward the ocean, my brain somehow calm and empty, sick of itself, taking a sick day. — Catherine Lacey

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

Being alone was what I wanted; being alone was not what I wanted. — Catherine Lacey

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

some places are not good places to be a person and not a car and that was where I was. — Catherine Lacey

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

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

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

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

[...] I had to press against the Plexiglas to feel the blood and body heat of his loss, stare hard at the loss so I could remember how its face was shaped, the exact color of its eyes, something to get me through the next year of living with my husband and not his loss, but the lack of his loss, a bleached-out version of it, a numb heart that hosted something with a real heart and pulse and wildness because my husband had only the most basic pulse and absolutely no wildness, but his loss was wild, was wild and filled with fast blood, and I could understand that angry bright red thing. — Catherine Lacey

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's a certain kind of woman who will notice someone's terror and call it bravery. — Catherine Lacey

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

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

most dependable things in the world are not of any significant use to any substantial problems. — Catherine Lacey

Everyone wants to feel like they could destroy a small-to-medium-to-large part of someone who loves them. — Catherine Lacey

What is the point of love? To distract us. — Catherine Lacey

and I had come to this country where I could laugh, so gently, gently laugh at things that were actually not funny. — Catherine Lacey

People in large quantities are terrible. — Catherine Lacey

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

[...] I went back to arguing with my husband and he didn't know about my face-stabbing thoughts and it made me even angrier that he didn't know about my face-stabbing thoughts, that he couldn't just intuit these things, look into my eyes and know that the way he spoke to me was a plain waste of our life [...] — Catherine Lacey

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

I was still new to this kind of adrenaline, the immediate release of anger instead of gnawing on it like overdue gum. — Catherine Lacey

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

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

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

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

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

Days are a finite resource and it's best to protect the ones you have. — Catherine Lacey

[...] being occasionally destroyed is, I think, a necessary part of the human experience. — Catherine Lacey

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

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

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

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

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

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

What more could anyone want than to try to change and be changed by someone? — Catherine Lacey

Lately, I couldn't remember those years, as if childhood was a movie I'd only seen the previews to. — Catherine Lacey

Please describe the feeling of love.
Someone holding you by the wrist. — Catherine Lacey

Judas put his arm around me. I smiled and thought of the words unreality and despair. — Catherine Lacey

What I was to do with my hands suddenly became a distinct and unsolvable problem. — Catherine Lacey

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

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

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

[...] 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He didn't care if you were safe, he just cared if you were his. — Catherine Lacey

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

Every few minutes or so I would remember the look from the man who had wanted fifty cents, and I'd look at that framed memory hanging in myself and it meant I was here, back in this sick city, but in other ways I was not here at all and anyone who looked closely could see that I had nothing to give, that I was a junk drawer, a collection of things that may or may not have had a use. — Catherine Lacey

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

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

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

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

Maybe misery begins everywhere. — Catherine Lacey

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

...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

But there was no equation or series of questions that could turn this moment into an answer. — Catherine Lacey

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

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

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

Why were we never together anymore, just alone in each other's vicinity? — Catherine Lacey

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

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

It was not that kind of leaving. I am not that kind of gone. — Catherine Lacey

We did not exist, the we we thought we'd always be. — Catherine Lacey

After some time my husband reached over to hold my hand, which reminded me that at least there was this, at least we still had hands that remembered how to love each other, two bone-and-flesh flaps that hadn't complicated their simple love by speaking or thinking or being disappointed or having memories. They just held and were held and that is all. Oh, to be a hand. — Catherine Lacey

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

. . . 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

I look back at this moment sometimes, the moment I accepted this job, and I have to wonder what kind of decision it was--the right decision that is the wrong one, or the wrong one that's actually right. Someday I hope this is clear to me, that I can find the right end, the right moral to this story. Am I the sort of person who makes life harder than it has to be? Did I actively invite all this trouble into my life or was I just doing the best I could? But it's as terrible as it is true: everyone has something in them they cannot yet see. — Catherine Lacey