Nobody Is Ever Missing 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

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

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

Katherine often teases me that I'm missing the need-a-boyfriend gene, but the truth is I just haven't met anyone who ... well, whom I'm attracted to, even though part of me longs for the fabled trembling knees, heart-in-my-mouth, butterflies-in-my-belly moments. Sometimes I wonder if there's something wrong with me. Perhaps I've spent too long in the company of my literary romantic heroes, and consequently my ideals and expectations are far too high. But in reality, nobody's ever made me feel like that. — E.L. James

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe misery begins everywhere. — Catherine Lacey

Chess and you taking a picture of me reading Slaughterhouse-Five, telling me I'd need proof someday because nobody in Creek View would ever believe I had actually read a goddamn book, let alone five. Talking about God and why there's evil in the world and bitching because the Steelers won the Super Bowl. Camp Leatherneck, me not missing home at all and you missing it like crazy, always talking about going to college and how when you had leave you were gonna marry Hannah. And you wanted kids, and I said I didn't because people like me, we just end up disappointing one another and I'd probably be like my dad, and you told me I had to get over it, get over my dad and my mom and how screwed up everything is because you said, Josh, you're gonna have it all. I know it. You're gonna have it all. And for the first time, I'm almost believing that. — Heather Demetrios

Shooting a pistol while running with any accuracy at all is next to impossible. They train us at the Academy to do it at a walk. Slow yourself down, focus on the target. Be relentless, but be accurate. Nobody ever won a gunfight by missing what they were aiming at. — Jonathan Maberry

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

People in large quantities are terrible. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Natasha,
It's the middle of the night. I can't sleep. Thoughts are creeping through my head like darkness slips around the bodies of sky scrapers in every city we've ever been to. From the bottom up, suffocating the life on the street first and then raising to the head and the brain, circling into smog and clouds until the black stretches up so high that nobody can even remember what the stars used to look like.
This is how I feel when I lie awake and think of you. I miss you. — Melodie Ramone

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

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

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

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 thought I detected a bit of wonder in his voice, that he'd like to become part of a story, any story. — Catherine Lacey

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

He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing. Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up. Nobody is ever missing. — John Berryman

. . . 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

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

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