Catherine Lacey > Quotes

“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, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“if you’re raised with an angry man in your house,
there will always be an angry man in your house.
you will find him even when he is not there.
and if one day you find that there is
no angry man in your house—
well, you will go find one and invite him in!”
― Catherine Lacey, Cut

“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, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“[...] being occasionally destroyed is, I think, a necessary part of the human experience.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“No one likes to be unrecognizable. No one wants to be a stranger to someone who is not a stranger to them.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“It’s always seemed to me—and as I get older, I feel this even more intensely—that kindness to other people comes with its own reward. It can be immediately felt. And the only thing I can see that a belief in divinity makes possible in this world is a right toward cruelty—the belief in an afterlife being the real life … not here. People need a sense of righteousness to take things from others … to carry out violence. Divinity gives them that. It creates the reins for cruelty …”
― Catherine Lacey, Pew

“Isn’t everyone on the planet or at least everyone on the planet called me stuck between the two impulses of wanting to walk away like it never happened and wanting to be a good person in love, loving, being loved, making sense, just fine? I want to be that person, part of a respectable people, but I also want nothing to do with being people, because to be people is to be breakable, to know that your breaking is coming, any day now and maybe not even any day but this day, this moment, right now a plane could fall out of the sky and crush you or the building you’re in could just crumble and kill you or kill the someone you love— and to love someone is to know that one day you’ll have to watch them break unless you do first and to love someone means you will certainly lose that love to something slow like boredom or festering hate or something fast like a car wreck or a freak accident or flesh-eating bacteria— and who knows where it came from, that flesh-eating bacteria, he was such a nice-looking fellow, it is such a shame— and your wildebeest, everyone’s wildebeest, just wants to get it over with, can’t bear the tension of walking around the world as if we’re always going to be walking around the world, because we’re not, because here comes a cancer, an illness a voice in your head that wants to jump out a window, a person with a gun, a freak accident, a wild wad of flesh-eating bacteria that will start with your face.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“What a terror a body must live through. It’s a wonder there are people at all.”
― Catherine Lacey, Pew

“None of us know how to fix ourselves, at least not entirely, not well enough.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“Why did living feel so invisibly brief and unbearably long at once?”
― Catherine Lacey, Pew

“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, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“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, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“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, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“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, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“A moment only happens once but some of them take so much longer than a moment to understand, to see.”
― Catherine Lacey, Pew

“Perhaps that's what all books are, the end of someone's trouble, someone putting their trouble into a pleasing order so that someone else will look at it.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“I felt so sure then. ‘Course, I was younger. It’s easier to be certain of things then. The older you get the more you see how certainty depends on one blindness or another.”
― Catherine Lacey, Pew

“I needed nothing and was needed nowhere. I almost doubted I was alive.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“Everyone wants to feel like they could destroy a small-to-medium-to-large part of someone who loves them.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“Whatever else I may have been, I was, I knew, not theirs.”
― Catherine Lacey, Pew

“Love is a compromise for only getting to be one person.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“The human mind is so easily bent, and so uneasily smoothed.”
― Catherine Lacey, Pew

“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, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“Being alone was what I wanted; being alone was not what I wanted.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“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, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“if you're raised with an angry man in your house, there will always be an angry man in your house. you will find him even when he is not there.”
― 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, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“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, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“I do not belong to the era of writers who will be able to make any sense of this particularly turbulent chapter of American history; one cannot make a bed while still tangled in its sheets.”
― Catherine Lacey, Biography of X

“I closed my eyes, tried to get as far away from myself as I could.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers