Grealy Quotes & Sayings

I like to get one pair of shoes and wear them till they're dirty. Besides, I don't walk - I glide, like butter. Float like a vampire. I'm like Louis Vuitton, but smoother. He wishes he were like me. — Kid Cudi

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

At times I was desperate and could find no solace anywhere. Nothing seemed to work, and the weight of being trapped in my own body made it difficult to lift even a hand off the sheets. — Lucy Grealy

Anxiety and anticipation, I was to learn, are the essential ingredients in suffering from pain, as opposed to feeling pain pure and simple. — Lucy Grealy

There are those wonderful moments of clarity in life when one is reminded how irreparably flawed we humans are. Once, when I was nineteen, on the subway in Boston I lost my balance slightly and bumped into an elderly woman. I quickly apologized and she replied, "Well, hold on to something, stupid." There it is. That's it. That's it in a nutshell. I don't want to sound negative, but I think every fetus should be shown a film of that incident, maybe projected up on the uterine wall, and then asked if it wants to come out. I am a strong believer in a woman's right to choose, but I also think that in the last trimester, the kid should be given every opportunity to back out. — Paula Poundstone

How could one doubt that the order in which one was picked for the softball team was anything but concurrent with the order in which Life would be handing out favors? — 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

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

Sometimes the briefest moments capture us, force us to take them in, and demand that we live the rest of our lives in reference to them. — Lucy Grealy

Reinforced to me again and again was how I was a 'brave girl' for not crying, a 'good girl' for not complaining, and soon I began defining myself this way, equating strength with silence. — Lucy Grealy

When I tried to imagine being beautiful, I could only imagine living without the perpetual fear of being alone, without the great burden of isolation, which is what feeling ugly felt like. — Lucy Grealy

Father sticks to it that anything that promises to pay too much can't help being risky. — Dorothy Canfield Fisher

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

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

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? — Lucy Grealy

Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people ... — Lucy Grealy

It is by no means your past that determines or dictates your present or your future; it is what you think and what you say, which then results in what you feel and what you do. — Miya Yamanouchi

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 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

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

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

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

I just saw Memento. It's very, very good. I watch a lot of French films. — Colleen Haskell

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

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

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

None of us understood that the body is a connected thing. — 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 began a lifelong affair with nostalgia, with only the vaguest notions of what I was nostalgic for. — Lucy Grealy

I feel very Midwestern at my core. — Graham Moore