“She missed his nothing. It had felt like something.”
— Catherine Lacey
“Maybe misery begins everywhere.”
— Catherine Lacey
“Days are a finite resource and it’s best to protect the ones you have.”
— 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
“It depressed me to think that I might have been looking at another person but seeing only myself.”
— Catherine Lacey
“Speaking felt impossible, as contained and enclosed as she was, a longing that went on a loop, a longing for nothing at all.”
— Catherine Lacey
“And who is to say that loving a person isn’t just loving the idea of that person and not the actual person, all these incomprehensible clots of flesh with all their years gone by and vanished, all their history stored in basements even they cannot reach?”
— 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
“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 needed nothing and was needed nowhere. I almost doubted I was alive.”
— Catherine Lacey
“All your problems and all the answers to those problems exist in the boundaries of your body.”
— Catherine Lacey
“Someone said once that they’d never heard of a crime they couldn’t imagine committing, and I realized then that if I had a daughter and she had a rabbit and that rabbit was alone with me and I was feeling the way I felt right now and I had a way to kill that rabbit and the time to spend killing that rabbit then killing the rabbit was something I could imagine myself possibly doing or at least considering doing or being on the edge of doing. And smearing a husband with the blood wasn’t such a far step after that if you had a desire to smear your husband with blood and smearing someone with blood was something I could imagine a situation calling for because there were at least a few people in this world that I wouldn’t not like to see smeared with blood—one person being Werner for fucking my plans, for sending me back out into a life with my wildebeest, to figure out a way to live here and I didn’t want to do that and I didn’t know how to do that and I wasn’t sure how I was going to do that—”
— 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
“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
“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 thought I detected a bit of wonder in his voice, that he’d like to become part of a story, any story.”
— 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 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
“He believed that all forms of government were spiritually bankrupt, that the only true way to follow Jesus was to be radically self-reliant – off every grid. The energy grid was wasteful and corrupt, and the food grid devalued and destroyed the planet, and the culture at large was full of pain and deceit, and money itself was truly evil, and even the church (or, as he would say, the corporation that calls itself the church) was the most corrupt – contaminated by money and political greed and widespread land ownership. Worst of all, they called themselves holy.”
— Catherine Lacey
“Everyone wants to feel like they could destroy a small-to-medium-to-large part of someone who loves them.”
— Catherine Lacey
“I couldn’t blame anyone for what was in me, because I am, like everyone, populated entirely by myself.”
— Catherine Lacey
“He would never be that way again. He would never have the power of that specific kind of not-knowing.”
— 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
“None of us know how to fix ourselves, at least not entirely, not well enough.”
— 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
“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 closed my eyes, tried to get as far away from myself as I could.”
— Catherine Lacey
“…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
“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